Degrowth and Animism

Animism Reborn: A Review of Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World – Anima/Soul

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POSTED ONAUGUST 27, 2020 BY MICHELLE GALIMBA

Animism Reborn: A Review of Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World


I will begin at the end. The last sentence in Jason Hickel’s new book is “We have everything to lose and a world to gain.” We have always had everything to lose, perhaps, but it is only relatively recently that we have, and by “we” I mean we of the so-called First World, drifted so far into a mass delusion that we no longer live in “the world.” We live off the world, enjoying lifestyles that depend on long supply chains which we barely realize exist. We have developed elaborate intellectual structures to deny that the world matters or has any standing except as a extraction site or a dump. To mainstream political and economic thinking, the world is not a factor in any discussion of goals and values. The world as foundational to our being, much less as a full subject with intrinsic value to itself, has no place in mainstream thinking. It is a resource, a dead corpse on which we feed. This is our Achilles’ heel, our fatal blind spot. It has been built into our intellectual tradition for millennia. It is our daunting task to alter that tradition, change the intellectual DNA of our civilization, and re-learn the values and aspirations that animate our daily lives. Jason Hickel’s book is an important contribution to that effort.

A quick synopsis of the contents: Part One, titled More is Less, sketches the rise of Western capitalist modernity and its increasingly disastrous outcomes. Part Two discusses the possibilities of a post-capitalist, de-growth evolution.

Hickel’s earlier work The Divide makes a illuminating case for re-thinking “Third World development” and the relationship between global North and South. Less is More builds upon that earlier work, but also takes it in a new, more risky direction. It is relatively easy and safe to make technical arguments about macro-economics and to critique the inequities of global capitalism. But in Less is More Hickel also critiques the foundations of “the divide” in the strains of thought that have led to our instrumentalist, extractive, ruthless social order. He calls out the European Enlightenment – Bacon and Descartes in particular – for drawing up the philosophical permits to ravage the world in the name of God, Reason and Modernity.

As an alternative to this dismal, world-ravaging tradition and its dismal science, Hickel points to the indigenous traditions of animism to make the argument that it is animism’s inherent ecological sophistication that is more rational in the long term than the extractive logic of modernity. There is no argument more important. Bruno Latour speaks of moving from economy to ecology as the guiding metaphor of our civilization. Animism is the key that turns ecology from a way of knowing into a way of life.

But to call up animism is an attack on the foundations of capitalist exploitations and its resultant privileges, and that means risking being ostracized by the gate-keepers of High Seriousness and Academic Prestige. I deeply appreciate the risks that Hickel is running in making the argument for animism and indigenous ecological knowledge.

As a step towards changing our trajectory, Hickel makes the case for the de-growth paradigm and its positive possibilities: “Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibilty. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that’s fizzing with life.” The concept of degrowth is necessary in order to call out the almost religious power that the idea of economic growth has over our thinking, but it may only be a stage on our way to becoming animists/ecologists. And to getting our world back, which may be what we always and only wanted in the first place.
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https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2021/2/11/ecosocialism-is-the-horizon-degrowth-is-the-way

Ecosocialism is the Horizon, Degrowth is the Way


A review of Less is More and interview with Jason Hickel.





“Degrowth” means many things to many people. To most, it probably doesn’t mean much beyond an antonym to “growth,” the process of getting larger or more complex. To some detractors, the term represents a scary violation of the imperative to increase GDP annually, what’s now a holy sacrament to policymakers and economic pundits (though less so to actual academic economists, who are more ambivalent). To its less pedantic and more hysterical detractors, it’s a ploy to take away everyone’s Hummers and return to a mushroom-foraging-based economy.

At its most distilled, “degrowth” refers to a process of reducing the material impact of the economy on the world’s many imperiled ecologies, abandoning GDP as a measurement of well-being, and forging an equitable steady-state economy.

Although the concept of placing limits to economic growth is not very new, having been articulated by environmentalists several decades ago—most famously by the Club of Rome in 1972—the more recent iteration, only just over a decade old, emerges from the French décroissance. Given that the community and scholarship is so young, there’s still a lot of debate around some of the fundamentals of what the term means, and what it should mean. Some who believe in the principles recoil at the term itself: Noam Chomsky has said “when you say ‘degrowth’ it frightens people. It’s like saying you’re going to have to be poorer tomorrow than you are today, and it doesn’t mean that.” But many degrowth defenders, one of the most prominent being ecological economist Giorgos Kallis, stand by it and see value in such a unifying notion.

Even so, there lurks some danger in all such terms and political communities, like socialism or democracy, as I have warned elsewhere of the perennial risk of being co-opted and ill-defined by bad-faith actors. If the degrowth critique goes only as far as targeting economic growth, or even general anticapitalism, there’s little intrinsic to it to stop a right-wing authoritarian program from co-opting degrowth rhetoric to justify imposing authoritarianism, or giving cover to cynical Global North states to demand degrowth of the Global South while continuing to disproportionately consume and pollute. Degrowth, if it is to get traction and if that traction is to be desirable, needs to be abundantly clear about what it stands for and what it rejects. Luckily, we have just the book to offer this much needed clarity.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel is among the most eloquent advocates of degrowth, and has been intimately involved in the community’s attempt to stake out a useful, clear meaning for the term and pathway to integrating its principles into a coherent program. Hickel’s latest book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World published in August 2020 (with a paperback edition released this month), offers an abundance of facts, concepts, and research alongside a passionate defense of ecocentric and humanistic values. Hickel has achieved something many writers of popular nonfiction seek in vain: a high density of ideas and data delivered in a light, enjoyable narrative prose. The book makes a very strong case for a topic in need of strong cases. And Less Is More arrives in good company: degrowth advocate Timothée Parrique counted 203 essays, 70 academic articles, and 11 books on degrowth published in 2020.

Some bad-faith commentators have attempted to paint degrowth as dressed-up primitivist austerity, intrinsically harmful to the Global South, but Hickel does a persuasive job emphasizing that degrowth actually means the opposite. He musters an army of historical and contemporary data, anecdotes, and theory to argue definitively that an equitable degrowth scenario is more likely to increase material abundance and resource access. If the ideology of growthism offers an ethic of constant amoral expansion and exploitation, degrowth(ism) offers a more restrained ethic that values an abundance of time, leisure, love, and equality over concentrated wealth and distributed waste.

While the book explores the moral imperative for controlled degrowth, Hickel is equally comfortable arguing for degrowth from a standpoint of a purely rational approach to fundamentally shifting an economy that is currently heating the world to death, guaranteeing centuries of mass death and destruction. The only way to slow the rapid race to collapse civilization and accelerate extinctions is to stop the omnicidal political economy that rules the globe. Given the natural limits that thermodynamics and terrestrial ecologies impose on human economies and non-human populations, degrowth is inevitable: it’s just a matter of deciding whether human agency will play a positive, benevolent role in the process, or continue to maximize the chaos and violence involved. I asked Dr. Hickel via email about some of the major challenges to achieving degrowth reforms and some important peripheral issues. Here is our discussion:




SMM: The ideology of degrowthism seems very compatible with a range of anticapitalist programs from ecosocialism to Green New Deal social democracy to anarchism and heterodox environmentalist political economy. Do you see degrowthism ideally as its own ideological program, or a supplement to existing traditions, both, or something else?

JH: The power of degrowth is that it offers a critique, and an alternative path, that speaks to a broad range of movements. So, we can support the social-democratic vision of a Green New Deal, but point out that it cannot be achieved if we continue to pursue growth at the same time. If we want the Green New Deal to be feasible, just, and ecologically coherent, we should abandon growth as an objective and focus directly on social and ecological goals instead. Similarly, we can support the demands of Extinction Rebellion for rapid decarbonization, while offering a clear strategy for how this can be achieved in a just and equitable way.

What I like about degrowth is that it offers a critique of capitalism that makes sense to people who are not already anti-capitalist, because it gets to the nub of what capitalism is really about. Most people assume capitalism is about markets and trade; and what could possibly be wrong with that? But markets and trade were around for thousands of years prior to capitalism; what makes capitalism distinctive is that it is organized around, and dependent on, perpetual expansion, for the sake of elite accumulation. When you point this out to people they immediately recognize it as a problem, and start thinking about what a post-growth, post-capitalist society might look like. In other words, degrowth offers a kind of practical and relevant entry to post-capitalist thought.

I think that most proponents of degrowth would consider themselves to be ecosocialists of some stripe (with various persuasions running from democratic socialism to anarchism to autonomism). But there is a tendency within ecosocialism that assumes growth can and should continue, with the goal of achieving some kind of automated, millionaire-style luxury for all, while hoping that state policy and publicly-funded technological innovations will make this vision compatible with ecology. In other words, a kind of left-wing ecomodernism. Degrowth rejects this approach on the grounds that it is ecologically illiterate, but also because we just don’t need growth (i.e., an increase in resource throughput and commodity output) to achieve a flourishing society – that assumption is a holdover from capitalist ideology, which falsely seeks to equate growth with human well-being, and we should reject it. So, one might sum it up like this: ecosocialism is the horizon, degrowth is the way.

Degrowth also adds an anti-imperialist ethic to ecosocialism. We have to understand that high levels of consumption always rely on forms of extraction and appropriation from elsewhere, specifically, colonial or neo-colonial “frontiers”. Degrowth is attentive to these dynamics. The call for degrowth in the global North is not just about ecology. It is also a call for decolonization in the global South. Ecosocialism without anti-imperialism is not an ecosocialism worth having.

SMM: Is degrowthism more immediate stopgap to halt the extinction and climate crises, or more long-term civilization-building, or something else?

JH: No, it’s definitely not just a stopgap to halt ecological breakdown, because it’s not just about ecology. Degrowth represents an approach to halting ecological breakdown that is just and equitable. It requires a different kind of economy, and a different kind of society. In that sense, yes it does represent civilization-building. But it also has an undeniable immediacy to it. These are things that need to be done now, starting this decade, in order for us to have anything like a reasonable chance of stopping dangerous climate change.

SMM: Many mainstream commentators, from liberals to the entire right-wing media-government-industrial complex and even some growthist socialists, are still generally opposed to ideas of degrowth. Is it worth trying to reach these hostile groups or to focus on those without a preformed opinion? Following up, which groups have you found generally most receptive to the ideas in Less is More? Do you see unorthodox coalitions forming?

JH: There is a certain faction of the socialist left (mostly older males in the global North, many of them economists) who seem personally offended by degrowth, and express their vitriol on social media accordingly. What strikes me about this faction is that it seems they have read little if any actual degrowth literature, to say nothing of the broader literature on ecological economics. It is a knee-jerk reaction to something they haven’t thought about. If they would engage in good faith, I suspect they would find it all much more reasonable than they assume. What’s great about degrowth scholarship is that it is deeply grounded in empirical evidence; it has to be, as this is required of any insurgent idea that hopes to go up against longstanding assumptions.

As for the right, to the extent that they are committed to serving the interests of capital, I am under no illusion that they would give degrowth a fair hearing, any more than they would give even the most basic tenets of social democracy a fair hearing. Liberals are a different story, though; degrowth has received good coverage in establishment outlets like the New Yorker, Vox, The Guardian, LARB etc. If you’re paying attention to the ecological crisis, you know that our existing approach isn’t working and you’re ready for something else. People are increasingly open to new ideas. In fact, to my surprise, it seems that broader public audiences tend to be remarkably receptive to degrowth. It was once thought that we shouldn’t use the word degrowth, for fear that people might misunderstand it and be turned off. I’ve found the opposite; people seem to find it intuitive and refreshing. It makes no sense to patronize people, as though they’re not capable of understanding the nuances of the concept. Instead, appeal to their intellect, their sense of humanity, their sense of care and solidarity – that is much more powerful.

SMM: Shrinking the economy and building a steady-state one could hypothetically be achieved with authoritarian austerity rather than egalitarian abundance (the latter of which Less is More places at the heart of degrowthism). Do you think there is a risk of degrowth being co-opted, as socialist principles have frequently been co-opted, to justify authoritarian states? How can degrowthists maintain control of the idea to avoid co-optation by authoritarians?

JH: I don’t think the word “austerity” works for what you’re describing here. Austerity is what growth-oriented governments do when they are desperate to get growth going: they slash spending on public goods to create artificial scarcities that induce people into competitive productivity (George Osborne was explicit about this), and they privatize public services and assets in order to create new frontiers for investment and to expand the remit of the market. These are growthist strategies. It’s not clear to me that any government that wanted to reduce throughput would adopt austerity measures to accomplish this goal, because that wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem isn’t public services. The problem is capitalism.

If capitalism calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth, degrowth calls for the opposite: reversing artificial scarcities in order to remove growthist pressures, and indeed to render additional growth unnecessary. Expanding universal public services is key to this (i.e., the opposite of austerity). As for the problem of excess throughput: this is being driven by unnecessary industrial activity (in other words, industrial activity that is organized around exchange-value rather than use-value) and elite accumulation. So that’s what we have to degrow.

Of course, one can imagine this being achieved by an authoritarian government, but it wouldn’t work very well. The problem with any elitist state structure is that it is removed from the complex realities of regional ecology. You can’t manage ecosystems with abstract planning (James Scott’s work in Seeing Like a State is good on this); it requires the knowledge of people who have a relationship with the land… it requires commoners. We know that when people have collective democratic control over local ecological commons they make decisions to sustain rather than liquidate them. That’s the principle we need to build on. So we reject authoritarianism not only on political-ideological grounds, but also because authoritarianism is intrinsically anti-ecological.

I think Murray Bookchin is correct on this point. Our relationship with nature will mimic the structure of our society. If we organize society around hierarchy, domination and extraction (which is true of both capitalism and any form of authoritarianism), then our relationship with nature will be hierarchical, dominating and extractive. But if we organize society around egalitarianism, reciprocity and care, then our relationship with nature will be egalitarian, reciprocal and caring. Every human society necessarily relies on nonhuman species; the question is, according to what principles do we incorporate them?

SMM: The degrowth community is still relatively small (though has grown very quickly). What would you say is the greatest obstacle to spreading degrowthist principles to mainstream audiences? There probably are very different obstacles depending on the community one is approaching. But if you could point to the biggest barrier, that if we fixed this one thing we could make a lot of progress on spreading the idea, what would it be?

JH: The key thing is that those who align with degrowth ideas need to be bold enough to champion them, rather than leaving this to “experts”. Those of us who have become public voices for degrowth can only do so much on our own. Ideas spread when people spread them. Form book clubs, write op-eds for your local paper, do radio interviews with your local station. If you’re a postgraduate student who is interested in degrowth, then actively contribute to developing the idea and answering the remaining questions, from a position of solidarity, rather than writing about it from a remove.

Other than that, I think we need to normalize the word. I meet so many politicians and other thought-leaders who privately align with degrowth ideas, but try not to use the word because they’re worried about how it will be received. I get that. I understand that this is more or less the position that people like Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky have taken. But we can only advance the conversation by actually talking about it. We need people who are bold enough to do that. Angela Davis said “One of the greatest challenges of any social movement is to develop new vocabularies.” Words like degrowth enable new thinking and analysis, and we need that now more than ever.

SMM: Less Is More includes a really fascinating section on the creation story of capitalism. The story is basically of peasants who threw off the rule of aristocrats and built egalitarian communes that also were quite animistic, with an ecologically-minded relationship to non-human (or your great phrase “more-than-human”) life. Rulers invented capitalism to basically extract more from the peasant communities and compel farmers to extract more from the land. The takeaway seems to be that in the absence of such psychopathic aristocrats and autocrats, people generally self-organize into more or less eco-anarchist democracies. There are many examples of Indigenous societies incorporating social tools to maintain democratic politics and prevent wealth and power hoarders from taking over. Are there practical mechanisms (that you didn’t include in Less Is More) that you’d point to for achieving such enviable accountability in modern fossil states, or do we just need to hope for collapses and fragmentation?

JH: It's worth remembering that the ecological ontologies that characterize many Indigenous communities today are not some kind of timeless trait. They have been formulated in response to capitalism. In most cases these communities, or their ancestors, have had first-hand experience of the violence of colonial capital. They know how destructive it is, to both humans and ecologies, especially on the frontiers of the world-system. Consider the devastation wrought by the European invasion of the Americas, which wiped out 90% of the population and turned vast tracts of land into plantation monoculture and strip mines. That’s the context here. Indigenous communities have seen apocalypse up close, and their ontologies have been formed accordingly, with an acute awareness of the values that are required if we are to thrive together on this planet.

I expect that if ecological crisis causes our civilization to collapse and fragment, similar ontologies will emerge, with a kind of “never again” ethic: never again will we treat the living world as a stock of resources, never again will we organize the economy around perpetual growth, never again will we allow elites to monopolize power, etc. But I don’t think that such a collapse is the only way to get there; nobody wants that. My goal in Less is More is to argue that we can feasibly transition to an ecological economy and prevent collapse. The book charts a clear pathway from here to there. There’s still time to take it, but that window is quickly closing.

SMM: You wrote a really great essay about how status quo defenders like Stephen Pinker and Bill Gates use narratives of progress to stifle real change and authentic progress, which your previous book The Divide also speaks to. Do you see Less Is More and degrowth more generally as putting forward an alternative story and definition of progress, or rejecting progressive narratives entirely, or something else?

JH: The problem with the dominant progress narrative is that it is deeply disingenuous. People like Pinker and Gates, and the media outlets that have amplified them, appear to start from the position of seeking evidence to defend the status quo (basically, capitalism, and specifically the neoliberal variety). Toward this end, they overstate the extent of progress (for example, by selecting a poverty line that is well below subsistence), and they studiously ignore trends that complicate their good news narrative (for example, worsening ecological breakdown, increasing inequality, etc.). But their biggest error is that they attempt to cast progress as the spontaneous outcome of capitalism, when in fact it has been fought for by progressive social movements against the interests of the capitalist class.

For the first 400 years of its history, capitalism caused immiseration virtually everywhere it went: enclosure, dispossession, genocide, mass enslavement, colonization, famine. It wasn’t until 1870 that we began to see any improvement in life expectancy in Europe, and that was the product of the labour movement and related struggles for democracy, municipal socialism, and basic interventions like public sanitation, public housing, and public healthcare. We don’t see improvement in the global South until progressive movements succeed in achieving decolonization. This history is important, because it reveals that what’s required for progress isn’t growth as such (as in, an aggregate expansion in the commodity economy), but rather a fair distribution of income and opportunity, and access to universal public goods. It’s not rocket science, but it does require a political struggle. So one might say that degrowth redefines progress. The goal is to achieve well-being for all, in balance with the Earth’s ecosystems, and any step we take in this direction (i.e., degrowth) represents progress.

SMM: Less is More ends with a powerful argument for implementing more animistic spirituality and biocentric ethics as part of a degrowth agenda. This is close to my heart; something I’m struggling with is the question of how we can seek to achieve a sort of hegemony of such value systems while remaining faithful to cultural differences and local ecological conditions. Is there a practical way you would suggest starting to work toward evangelizing these values effectively?

JH: This is a real challenge. I think the first step is to amplify the voices of Indigenous leaders and activists who are already pointing in this direction. The Red Nation movement’s tagline says “All Relatives Forever”, with relatives here of course referring to both human and nonhuman persons. Consider the implications of such a politics; it is profound – far more radical, and far more inspiring and enriching, than traditional leftist discourse. Media outlets need to give platforms and column space to people like Winona LaDuke, Ailton Krenak, Nemonte Nenquimo and Robin Kimmerer, who are connecting anti-colonial struggles and post-capitalist visions with what we might call animist ontologies. This is not about warm, fuzzy spiritualism; on the contrary, it is the sharp edge of a radical politics.

I think the Rights of Nature movement is also promising; the more we talk about rivers, watersheds and ecosystems as persons, with rights to existence, the more this idea becomes thinkable. We don’t have to wait for national governments to create such rights; in many places local councils have this power. But we could also consider more direct interventions, such as creating ecological education programmes. Sweden did something like this in the 1960s, to enable people to learn about local ecosystems and develop ecological consciousness, on a mass scale. Schumacher College is an example of this in the UK. At minimum, we could make ecology a required course in schools and universities, with a strong practical component that allows students to develop inter-species understanding.

SMM: There’s been discussion about the utopian imaginary of degrowth. It seems so often that the only two visions of futuristic society we’re regularly presented with are either 1) progressively high-tech society with killer (or helper) robots and space colonies or 2) low-tech visions of what industrialized people think of as “primitivism,” maybe with returns to foraging or agrarian serfdom. Less Is More and degrowthism more broadly seem to be striking a totally different path that incorporates high-tech solutions to build low-tech, low-harm economies. Does that assessment ring true, or do you see it going in a different direction?

JH: Yes, that’s the way I see it. I am not anti-tech at all. The truth is that capitalism constrains innovation, rather than enabling it. Consider the fact that so many of our brightest minds are focused on getting people to click on ads and buy stuff they don’t need, or even want. That is literally the cutting edge of US capitalism. Not surprisingly, capitalism prioritizes innovations that will further the interests of capital accumulation, rather than innovations that we actually need to solve social and ecological problems. Then there’s the intellectual property regime; imagine the innovations that would happen if knowledge was shared freely, rather than being locked up in corporate patents for decades?

The second problem is that, under capitalism, innovations that deliver efficiency improvements lead not to a reduction of energy and resource use, but rather to more energy and resource use, because the gains are reinvested to expand the process of production and consumption. In other words, growthism wipes out our most impressive improvements. When it comes to confronting ecological breakdown, we must realize that it’s not our technology that’s the problem, it’s growth. In a post-growth or post-capitalist economy, this wouldn’t be a problem. Efficiency improvements would work as expect them to, and enable us to reduce our impact on the Earth.

SMM: Follow-up on the utopia: would you point to good fiction writing or recent research trying to put in really granular concrete terms what an ideal degrowth society might physically look like? Is it better to leave the visioning more open to local variations and not get too concrete and specific?

JH: A lot of people will point to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It’s a story about a kind of ecosocialist society on another planet. The premise is that the ecosystem is primarily desert, so people have to find ways to sustain a flourishing society with relatively little material throughput. They do it with a firm commitment to egalitarianism, public goods, and direct democracy. They fiercely reject elite accumulation, which they see as dangerously wasteful. Because they do not measure civilization in terms of the quantity of stuff they consume (as our society does), they are free to focus on higher goals: philosophy, science and art. It’s worth noting that Le Guin was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist who spent his career learning from Indigenous communities in the American Southwest. These were people who saw egalitarianism and direct democracy as essential to survival in a desert ecosystem. Le Guin was clearly inspired by their approach to the world.

There’s other literature that deals with degrowth themes, although without trying to portray a degrowth society. Michael Ende’s Momo comes to mind. There’s also Hayao Miyazaki’s films. Aldous Huxley’s Island. David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology explores ethnographic insights that are relevant to degrowth theory. Then there are the writings of anti-colonial leaders like Gandhi, Fanon and Sankara, who rejected growthism and sought to define a more human-centered economics. These are all resources we can draw on as we imagine a more just and ecological civilization.

SMM: Neoliberalism basically trojan-horsed itself into a global consensus (the horse being a shiny new innovative economic theory and the Greek soldiers being basic laissez-faire corporate serfdom now with Robots), its operating logic embedded into governments, international orgs, nonprofits, universities, and even individual minds while the name evaporates to the point where neoliberals deny neoliberalism exists. Of course we don’t (necessarily) want to replicate such a machiavellian underhanded maneuver, but do you ideally see degrowthism following a similar sort of trajectory of embedding its logic in a global consensus and then disappearing? Or does it need to totally abandon this Washington consensus model of international governance?

JH: There’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to degrowth political strategy. I think what’s required is a range of approaches. There are people at the community level working to bring degrowth principles to local economic governance. Transition Towns in the UK are a nascent example of this. So too with cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen adopting “doughnut economics”. We can see it at a national level, too, with New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland choosing to abandon GDP growth as a government objective. I think there’s hope at a multilateral level, too: the Environment Committee of the European Parliament just recently voted in favour of binding targets to reduce material throughput in absolute terms. That’s a core degrowth policy. Of course, it’s not law yet – but it’s a huge step.

The difference between neoliberal political strategy and degrowth is that the former had the backing of billionaires and corporations that bankrolled think tanks, university departments, and media outlets. It also had international financial institutions and the US military, which forcibly imposed the Washington Consensus around the world. Degrowth has to rely almost entirely on social movements. That’s a tall order, but we can take inspiration from our ancestors: the anti-slavery movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-colonial movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the labour movement, the feminist movement... all of these have changed the world, against overwhelming odds. That’s the scale of what’s required of us.

Samuel Miller McDonald is a writer and geography PhD student at University of Oxford studying the intersection of grassroots movements and energy transition.



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The New Republic
Magazine

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy
Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.


Alexander ZaitchikDecember 28, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM LAHAN





In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar. From our vantage, this may sound very farsighted and bold. But any prescient, planet-saving leadership seen shimmering through hindsight is a mirage. The speech and the panels advanced a program with the narrow goal of energy independence, not decarbonization. Carter wanted to expand and secure the nation’s economic wheel beyond OPEC’s reach, not question it, shrink it, slow it, or “green” it. “We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias [and] more coal than any nation on earth,” he boasted in the speech. “We have the national will to win this war.”


Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Buy on Bookshop
Penguin, 336 pp., $28.95

It’s a different event, buried in the Carter record, that offers a flash of the ecological vision often falsely ascribed to the ’79 energy plan. On the afternoon of March 22, 1977, between meetings with the prime minister of Japan and the National Security Council, Carter sat down in the Oval Office with a British-German economist named E.F. Schumacher. Four years earlier, Schumacher had achieved international fame as the author of Small Is Beautiful, a trenchant critique of the spiritual poverty and delusional frameworks of mainstream economics. His White House visit made him the most radical guest of a sitting president since Warren G. Harding requested an audience with Eugene V. Debs.



Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.” Schumacher was not alone in his concern. Starting in 1970, a group of system dynamics scientists at M.I.T. began feeding data into a supercomputer to examine where humanity was headed if it continued to consume energy and materials, and to create waste, unabated. They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century.



This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it by two generations of pro-growth economists and pundits. We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago. Yet critics of growth have achieved only a tenuous foothold in an increasingly dire debate over how to maintain the conditions for civilization in an age of climate emergency. In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.

The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century. Between roughly 1350 and 1550, the free peasants of Europe had organized subsistence agrarian societies that shared and managed resources—such as fuel, food, and building materials—taken from the common land. This did not sit well with the nobles, who grumbled that “servants are now masters and masters servants.” When elites began to enclose the common land, it triggered peasant rebellions that were violently suppressed, followed by what Hickel describes as a “humanitarian catastrophe”: Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.



This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter. As the sole possessor of mind, humanity was elevated above and cast in opposition to everything else on the planet. The pagan-agrarian understanding of the natural world as a nurturing mother gave way to Bacon’s view of nature as “a common harlot.” This way of thinking, Hickel argues, also encouraged European colonists to treat the non-Christian inhabitants of the New World not as human beings, but as resources to be exploited, whose enslavement in silver and gold mines fueled a second wave of capital accumulation. Descartes’s mechanical philosophy and theory of matter “was an explicit attempt to disenchant the world,” writes Hickel:


Once nature was an object ... whatever ethical constraints remained against possession and extraction had been removed…. Land became property. Living beings became things. Ecosystems became resources.

By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources. This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even lacked words for noneconomic considerations, let alone ends. From being a sign of God’s approval, Growth became God, a new deity for the new species called Homo economicus.

This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progress. Not even John Maynard Keynes, the quintessential modern growth economist, believed in infinite economic expansion for its own sake.



Hickel punctuates his history of growth with the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior. A measure of an economy’s total consumer and government spending, investments, exports, and imports, it institutionalized the celebration of a soulless and dangerously incomplete ledger. “If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up,” Hickel writes. “If you extend the working day and push back retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP includes no cost accounting. It says nothing about the loss of the forest as a habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions.” GDP also ignores the existence of unpaid labor—like child-rearing or caring for a sick relative—a fact that explains why feminist economists were some of the earliest and most astute critics of the metric.

Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.” This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts. As proof that this is not only possible but already happening, boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials. The process that replaced letters with email, and compact discs with digital files, will continue until we live in a spectral economy where little at all is manufactured or transported, save those things that can be pulled from thin air by, one presumes, solar-powered 3-D printers.

The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries. In 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”



The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality more closely associated with Obama’s successor. As Hickel points out, the argument for decoupling requires counting only those emissions released within national borders, and not those further upstream in the global production chains. By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.

The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle. A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by 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,” Hickel writes. “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.”

The dynamic helps explain what is happening in the energy sector. Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”



Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.” If this seems harsh, consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years. The economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200. The green growth position rests on the assumption that this can go on, basically forever, because innovation will “dematerialize” the economy. Yet 2000 was the first year that, according to experts, humanity used more energy and materials than the safe limit. And the growth economy, far from dematerializing, remains geared toward expanding future markets for extremely materials-heavy products like Tesla cybertrucks and Apple iPhones. Comparing this to a fairy tale is, if anything, too generous, since children’s stories usually involve some kind of moral lesson applicable to the real world.

The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury. In a word that never appears in the book: ecosocialism. Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourishing that he believes will follow from unshackling the economy from the growth imperative. That this will happen, Hickel has no doubts, and he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”

Ecomodernists huff loudly at claims that any kind of economic downshift—planned or unplanned—can result in anything but a drastic deterioration in human welfare. The evidence may suggest they are wrong. A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point. In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain. Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth. He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.

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University: Yale University
Course: Ecology And Conservation (EVST 262)
5 documents

Ecological Economics 189 (2021) 107160Available online 24 July 20210921-8009/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

BOOK REVIEWS Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, Jason Hickel. William Heinemann (2020).

 The central thesis of Jason Hickel’s latest book ‘Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World’ is that growthism, or an ideology of growth for its own sake, must be abandoned in order to avert environ-mental and social breakdown. That is the basic premise of ‘degrowth’, a project that in 2020 gained a prominent space in environmental debates. ‘Less is More’, however, goes further than answering the question of why we need to degrow energy and material use. It offers the first systematic historicization of degrowth and broadens nascent debates regarding the cultural direction of degrowth processes. Hickel regards urgently needed changes to our relationship with, and attitude to, nature as fundamental prerequisites to socioecological transformation. In comparison to its many fellow 2020 degrowth book publications, Hickel’s book stands out, perhaps not in brevity – its in-depth historical and policy analyses are anything but cursory – but in intellectual rigour and the type of transdisciplinary depth required to think through and act on the mul-tiple crises we face. ‘Less is More’ is written for the general public but is of interest to any scholar wanting to gain a holistic understanding of degrowth. Hickel advances an understanding of capitalism that is inherently tied to the gut-wrenching “eco-facts” he enumerates throughout the book, most of which environmentalist readers will be familiar with. Rather than foregrounding modes of production or property arrange-ments, Hickel identifies “growth for its own sake” (p. 20, italics in original) as the prime driver of capitalism and by extension, the ecological crises. More precisely, excess growth in high-income coun-tries and excess accumulation among the wealthy disproportionately use energy and resources. In highlighting questions of social and environ-mental justice at the outset, Hickel sets the stage for his overarching argument that a post-growth economy must necessarily be a post- capitalist one. Part I offers a grassroots retelling of the history of capi-talism, emphasising its dire social and environmental costs. Hickel starts with the peasant revolts in Europe and enclosure as an organised, violent backlash to post-feudalist, but pre-capitalist forms of common resource management. In addition to enclosure, colonisation is introduced as a capitalist “fix” to crises of elite accumulation. The appropriation of tropical nature and labour from enslaved indigenous Americans and Africans that fuelled the Industrial Revolution is considered an effect of capitalist growth. At the same time, European peasants and wage labourers were forced to work under newly created conditions of arti-ficial scarcity. Slavery and mass impoverishment were a socially accepted price for growth. During this process, capitalist forces and the power of the Church combined to eradicate widespread animist ontol-ogies, or beliefs in the living agency of the earth. Together with the rise of Cartesian science, dualism provided a cultural sanction to the resource plunder enabled by new technologies. Part I continues with an exploration of how growth is driven by the ‘iron law of capital’ in 20th and 21st century social, political and economic systems, from GDP, Structural Adjustment Programmes and neoliberalism to ‘atmospheric colonisation’. It concludes with a diligent review of ethical, technical and ecological issues of various green technologies and an empathic refutation of green growth. Part II displaces the centrality of economic growth in the human development story. Instead, it points to the role of public investment, sanitation, union organising, health care, education and income redis-tribution in securing life expectancy gains and wellbeing. The Global North doesn’t need growth to sustain welfare. Similarly, the South could forge its own development path without the growth imperative. Chapter 5 discusses degrowth and a potential policy roadmap. Building on Part I’s history of ideas, the last chapter discusses the role of culture and our relationship with nature in degrowth transitions. Hickel translates analytical insights from reviewing the animism in various indigenous cosmologies and modern scientific and philosophical challenges to Cartesian dualism into policy proposals: regenerative agroecology and Rights of Nature. The strength of ‘Less is More’ lies in accessibly weaving together a history of ideas and science, environmental history, ecological eco-nomics and anthropology into a compelling argument. Furthermore, the book systematically, methodically, and persuasively lays to rest some of the most pervasive and pernicious environmental myths, for example those of green growth and large-scale negative emissions technologies. Additionally, Hickel implicitly introduces a relational understanding of limits, adding to recent debates on physical boundaries versus morally constructed, internal limits to growth. Hickel argues we should focus on the interconnectedness of life on earth, rather than limits per se. This might avoid the criticism that a more overtly constructivist under-standing of limits invites. The link between capitalism and colonial conquest has been well established. The postcolonial scholars Hickel engages with also point to the colonisation of the mind and ideas as a powerful inhibitor to human development based on justice and wellbeing. Historical and postcolonial scholarship, however, may offer slightly more nuanced arguments than the book’s overly economistic analysis of colonisation. In using growth as a de facto explanation for colonisation, we must be careful not to map a single history onto the world. Yet, the fact that colonisation is given such a central place in an analysis of the modern world is commendable. With regards to feminisms, Hickel traces the gendered effects of growth surprisingly sparingly. Gender justice is reduced to reproductive rights. Population stabilisation plays a contested role in addressing ecological breakdown, so restricting the book’s gender analysis to this particularly thorny issue is disappointing. 

Finally, ‘Less is More’, juxtaposes ‘Carte-sian dualism’ with ‘animism’ in a manner that, perhaps inevitably, flattens their respective complexities and subtleties.

 Nevertheless, the book provides impetus to the search for a relational understanding of limits and nature in the degrowth literature and elsewhere. The book comes at a time when the pillars of growthism are being Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Economics journal homepage: 
Ecological Economics 189 (2021) 1071602   

shaken by social movements and ordinary people no longer accepting the status quo. It also arrived on the back of a global pandemic that pitted growth against health outcomes. ‘Less is More’ could therefore not have been published at a more opportune moment. Hickel introduces radical ideas that were once exclusive to academic debates. He tacitly answers how we might arrive at popular support for postgrowth policies: by changing the way we think about the natural world. A relational ontology would prefigure an economy based on reciprocity with the natural world. But the economic system itself profoundly shapes the way we see the world. So how do we link cultural change and policy implementation? The strategy question has become central to degrowth. It’s therefore surprising that ‘Less is More’ doesn’t offer a theory of political change, much less advice on what readers could do to exit the twin juggernauts of growth and capitalism. Yet, while Hickel isn’t de-tailing the ‘how’, he gives us an important direction of change. His thoughts on reciprocity and relationality with the natural world call for more serious engagement with Rights of Nature and indigenous strug-gles and cosmologies in political strategy, activism and scholarship. Economic growth is projected to rebound in the near future. We might, however, still be nearing a collective eureka moment in which we recognise, and ultimately abandon, the destructive ideology of growth. When it comes, ‘Less is More’ will have made a substantial contribution to that moment. Funding This work was supported by a Foundation Main Grant (2020−21) from Funds for Women Graduates (Grant Number GA-00443), and by the Graduate School Fund from Goldsmiths University of London. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Katharina Richter* Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University of London, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom *Corresponding author. E-mail address: k.richter@gold.ac.uk.


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Transcending capitalism’s growth imperative
Hans A BaerFebruary 18, 2021
Issue
1297

Hickel has pinned his hope for a pathway to a post-capitalist world in the degrowth paradigm.
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
By Jason Hickel
William Heinemann, 2020
318 pages


In Less is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist based at the University of London, has written a readable book that seeks to promote hope rather than doom in the era of the Anthropocene or, more appropriately, the Capitolocene.


As a fellow anthropologist, there is much in his book with which I agree and points with which I disagree, in part due to the fact that I am a historical materialist and an ecosocialist, and he an idealist and a proponent of the relatively recent degrowth framework.


Nevertheless, I am pleased that Hickel is willing to make global-local linkages and grapple with the burning issues such as capitalism, corporate power, resource extraction, social inequality, ecological devastation and climate change.


Hickel grapples with “how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world”.


He argues that to reverse the trend toward mass extinction, humanity needs to mobilise a rapid rollout of renewable energy as part of a global Green New Deal that will reduce world greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and to zero by 2050. However, this will require transcending capitalism with its growth imperative toward a global post-capitalist economy.


Hickel’s degrowth message is targeted primarily at people in high- and middle-income countries. It would entail systematic downscaling of energy and resource use to create an economy that is in “balance with the living world in a safe and equitable way”.


Hickel maintains that capitalism relies upon dualist thinking stemming back to philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, which in essence destroyed more holistic world views, particularly characteristic of animistic indigenous societies.


An annoying section of the book is Hickel’s appropriation of Marx’s classical formulas in which C represents commodity and M represents money, thus creating profit or surplus value, without crediting the developer of these formulas. Conversely, in his acknowledgements, he mentions having had conversations with ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster and Patrick Bond.


In reality, I suspect theoretically Hickel is an eclectic of sorts who has been inspired by the work of a wide assortment of progressive thinkers. Despite this shortcoming, Less is More makes for worthwhile reading, particularly given that it grapples with the need to transcend capitalism with a more socially just, democratic and environmentally sustainable economy.


In contrast to Indigenous societies, Hickel argues that the principle of dominion became entrenched during the Axial Age with the ascendancy of “transcendental philosophies and religions across major Euroasian civilisations”. As many others have, he argues that the Industrial Revolution relied on commodities produced by labour expropriated from slaves on colonised lands and European peasants forced into cities by enclosure acts. While capitalism has generated tremendous material productivity, it has done so by extracting resources from nature as cheaply as possible.


Hickel argues that, particularly with the rise of neoliberalism, Western governments have fully embraced the creed of “growthism”, a mandate that the gross domestic product needs to continually increase. Neoliberal policies, particularly structural adjustment, during the 1980s and 1990s depressed growth rates in much of the Global South. China, however, was an exception.


Hickel argues that the extraction of fossil fuels relied on mountaintop removal, offshore drilling, digging into tar sands and other destructive processes, all contributing to carbon emissions and climate change along with ocean acidification. While he maintains that the growing shift to renewable energy is laudable, it does not constitute a panacea, given that renewable energy is being added on top of dirty energies.


Hickel highlights large disparities in the “material footprints” of nations, with low income countries consuming about two tons of material stuff per person per year in contrast to lower-middle-income countries consuming about four tons, upper-middle income countries about 12 tons, and high-income countries about 28 tons.


Furthermore, high-income countries have outsourced much of their industrial production to the Global South. The Global North has engaged in atmospheric colonisation by which a small number of high-income countries have appropriated most of the atmospheric commons. While climate change will adversely impact the Global North, Hickel argues that 2°C of warming will be a “death sentence for much of the global South”.


Fortunately, Hickel argues the 2008 Global Financial Crisis damaged faith in neoliberal capitalism.


The Stockholm Resilience Centre developed the notion of nine planetary boundaries that humanity should not cross. Some of them have already been crossed, particularly the atmospheric carbon concentration.


Conversely, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported repeatedly about the severity of the climate crisis, it has not dared to challenge the growth imperative. Instead it has embraced various dubious techno-fixes, particularly bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).


BECCS proposes the creation of large tree plantations around the world that would sequester carbon dioxide, followed by the harvesting of trees, turning them into pellets to be burned in power plants for energy, with the emissions being captured and stored underground.


Hickel has pinned his hope for a pathway to a post-capitalist world in the degrowth paradigm, which proposes “reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive”.


To achieve a global post-capitalist economy, he notes a need to democratise the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization; a debt jubilee freeing poor countries to invest in needed services; ending corporate land grabs; distributing land back to small farmers; and reforming regimes that provide high-income countries an unfair advantage in the global agricultural industry.


Other steps that Hickel suggests for moving humanity to an “ecological civilisation” include: ending planned obsolescence; cutting advertising; shifting from ownership to usership; eradicating food waste; scaling down ecologically destructive industries; shortening the work week; eliminating “unnecessary” jobs and shifting workers to jobs in renewable energy production, public services, maintenance, etc.; capping wage disparities; and expanding the commons.


Hickel cites a study that he conducted with colleagues indicating that it is possible for Global South countries to achieve strong outcomes on every human development indicator. He argues that various countries, such as Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Thailand, China, Cuba and Bangladesh, as well as states such as Kerala in India, have managed to achieve high levels of human welfare with relatively little GDP per capita.


There is much food for thought in Hickel’s book, although it is not clear what role he see for anti-systemic movements and new left parties in making the shift to a post-capitalist world. He seems not to be conversant with the burgeoning literature on ecosocialism. Bearing this in mind, I suggest a greater dialogue among various proponents of a post-capitalist world system, including degrowth advocates, ecoanarchists and ecosocialists.


Books & musicClimate crisis


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The Case For Degrowth
Infinite growth on a finite planet is alarming and doesn’t even make us better off. A new book argues we must shed the ideology of “growthism.”


Nathan J. Robinson
filed 31 August 2020 in ECONOMICS
We now know that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an insanity. Not just an “imperfect measure of social well-being,” but a wholly irrational, arbitrary, and dangerous construct that must be ditched sooner rather than later. This is becoming more and more widely appreciated by economists—even the Harvard Business Review now says that “GDP is not a measure of human well-being,” and conservative policy analyst (and Mitt Romney adviser!) Oren Cass wrote in the New York Times a few days ago:


[R]arely have such economic indicators been so entirely beside the point. Seriously: Who cares? What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?


There have been efforts to develop alternative frameworks that get us away from using GDP as a measure of economic success, from the EU’s Beyond GDP initiative to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index to economist Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics” (the economy can be pictured as a doughnut—in the center is too little, on the outside is too much, and what we need is to be in the delicious sustainable ring). Yet newspapers are still filled with headlines about what the GDP has done that implicitly treat it as the measure of economic health: did the GDP expand? Did it contract? How do we get it growing again? We are a long way from shaking off the strange folk belief that a country’s job is to maximize the numerical “growth” of its products and services.


GDP is a measure of the market value of goods and services sold over a given period of time. The more that consumers consume, the higher the GDP. If twice as many cars are sold in the United States next year compared to this year, and all other things are equal, the GDP will rise. If twice as many people pay to have surgery, it will likewise go up. Mazzucato gives the example: if she marries her housekeeper, and they are doing the exact same work but in the context of a personal relationship rather than an employment relationship, the GDP will go down. If people are unusually healthy, the market value of medical services will go down. Of course, there are absolutely colossal amounts of care work that are performed without compensation. The classic critique of GDP is to point out that even incredibly destructive pollution can improve it: a factory could be getting lots of people sick, but their sickness is not being measured in GDP. In fact, GDP is growing, because (1) lots of people are buying the factory’s products (2) the sick people are buying medical treatment and (3) people are buying ways of mitigating the pollution.


A significant problem here, as Mariana Mazzucato documents in her history of the concept of economic value, The Value of Everything, is that over time “price” has become conflated with “value.” In fact, this is so commonplace in everyday thinking that, even though I think we all can nod and smile at Oscar Wilde’s famous description of the cynic as someone who knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing” (a phrase that now better describes economists), we infrequently consider how something could be worth a lot without actually being worth a lot.


But take our polluting factory: every year, it may be causing catastrophically negative effects. Its benefits may be negligible, say 50 jobs and the toy plastic SpongeBobs that it manufactures. But shutting it down would “shrink the economy,” because whether “the economy” is “growing” or “shrinking” is not measured by whether the aggregate amount of human social well-being is increasing or decreasing but by whether we’re buying more shit. Thus the majority of us could be more and more immiserated every day—unhappy, hopeless, sick, lonely—but so long as the market value of the goods and services we consume in the aggregate is going up, the “economy” will grow. And because whether the economy is growing is an aggregated measure, the GDP does not look at who is getting the benefits. It could well be that even on the very narrow criterion of “consuming more products,” a small wealthy subset of people are actually getting most of the enjoyment. (Not that increased consumption is a good proxy for well-being even for the upper classes—the lives of the super-rich are often hollow and unsatisfying, because it turns out that having 40 cars does not give you four times the satisfaction of having 10 cars.)


As Mazzucato explains, this represents a shift in how the economy is talked about. 200 years ago, “value” was assumed to be a quality that things had before they had prices. There were debates over what created value. But prices themselves were separate, for an obvious reason: the air we breathe has value, but no price. Bullshit financial products have prices, but serve only to transfer wealth from poor, desperate people who need money to wealthy, conniving people who already have it. The debate about “value” is necessarily philosophical, and requires, well, value judgments. What is “worth having” is something that we differ on, and there are no purely scientific answers.


Unfortunately, as economics became decoupled from philosophy (the field used to be called “political economy,” which better reflects the fact that economic ideas are necessarily political), and developed pretensions of being a science, many economists sought a way to pass off their normative beliefs as mere empirical facts. They reasoned as follows: if something is bought in a marketplace, without anyone coercing the buyer or seller, clearly the buyer desired to buy it and the seller desired to sell it. If the buyer was willing to pay more, they clearly valued the thing more. (I am willing to pay more for a house with four bedrooms than a house with three because a house with four bedrooms has something extra that I want.) Free market transactions are therefore mutually beneficial and would not occur unless both parties perceived themselves to be made better off by transacting. For a third party (the economist) to say that the transaction is not valuable is to impose subjective value judgments. The economist does not take a position on which transactions ought to happen. Instead, the measure of value is preference. If I buy a hamburger, my preference for a hamburger has been satisfied. Evaluating the success of an economy by the market value of its goods and services therefore seemed sensible, rather than insane, because it showed the degree to which people were having their subjective tastes (which it is not the economist’s job to question) satisfied under conditions of perfect freedom.


Growth in the provision of goods and services is therefore intrinsically good: it means more mutually beneficial transactions, thus more satisfaction. And while any sensible economist would admit that growth is an “imperfect proxy” for well-being, on the whole, if we are buying more stuff, it means we want more stuff, and if we both want more stuff and are getting more stuff, it means we are getting more of what we want, and are thus better off. There is a common assumption in economics that human beings have “infinite wants,” meaning that it will always be better to have more rather than less, so long as we can supply “more.” (More of what? More of whatever has a price in the market.) At the very beginning of Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus’ widely-used Economics textbook, it is made clear that mainstream economics is premised on the idea that we all have “unlimited wants”:


If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy even a small fraction of everyone’s consumption desires. Our national output would have to be many times larger before the average American could live at the level of the average doctor or major-league baseball player. Moreover, outside the United States, particularly in Africa, hundreds of millions of people suffer from hunger and material deprivation. Given unlimited wants, it is important that an economy make the best use of its limited resources.


In fact, the “unlimited wants” premise is false: only a select number of human beings, such as Jeff Bezos, can literally never be satisfied no matter how much they have. Most of us have modest desires: good food, satisfying occupations of our time, some entertainment now and then, positive social relationships, and a soft bed to sleep on. But when wants are treated as “unlimited,” with everyone aspiring to live like a “major league baseball player,” (and, presumably, wanting even more once they have reached that level), no amount of economic growth will ever be “enough.” Thus to satisfy “desires” we must perpetually increase the quantity (not just the quality, or the distribution) of goods and services produced.


But more goods/services quite obviously doesn’t in and of itself make the world better, without any analysis of what those goods/services actually are or what people’s lives are like. It is easy to imagine a society in which the market value of economic activity is going up and up, but the general trend is toward dystopia: the number of nuclear weapons is growing annually, which creates jobs, but an alarming percentage of people are exhausted all the time and want to kill themselves. I say it is easy to imagine such a society, because we live in one. Likewise, it is easy to imagine a society in which there is no growth but people are relatively content; go and try to explain to the isolated Sentinelese tribe why they ought to be maximizing their development and see how they feel about it. (They will probably fill you with arrows, and they will have a point.)


Mazzucato points out that the prevailing orthodoxy has led to the abandonment of critical normative questions and the embrace of mindless tautologies. Does Wall Street add value or is it parasitic? Well, conveniently for Wall Street, it adds value by definition, because under “price is value,” if it did not add value it would not prosper. Mazzucato argues that all kinds of socially harmful activities are therefore incentivized because, with the field uninterested in doing normative philosophy, we do not have the language to evaluate whether various economic activities are good. There are jokes about alleged measurement mistakes in the Soviet Union, things like “measuring coal production by the number of tons of coal shipped from one place to another, resulting in the same ton of coal being shipped in a circle over and over.” But how are the perverse incentives that fueled the opioid crisis any different? Purdue Pharma makes money hooking people on drugs, and has a direct incentive to downplay the risks of its product and convince as many people to try it as possible.


If you’re a free market libertarian, it’s not clear that there’s anything wrong with this. In fact, there’s a fascinating book from the 1970s by libertarian Walter Block called Defending the Undefendable, which makes arguments in favor of pimps, slumlords, blackmailers, corrupt cops, and drug pushers. The same argument recurs throughout: there’s a market for what they do, therefore what they do is good. Block has the courage to embrace the reductio ad absurdum: if the market produces outcomes that appall us morally and seem to be making a cruel and exploitative society, then instead of this indicting the market, it indicts morality. Given that the divine Invisible Hand does no wrong, we must change our principles to accommodate its actions, rather than demanding an economy that operates in accordance with our principles. Blackmailing someone produces value in market terms, therefore it is good, actually.


Crucially, “price = value” means that a whole lot of good work that is “unpriced” goes undervalued. Mazzucato points out that confusing market worth for actual worth has encouraged the absolutely absurd idea that “the private sector produces the wealth, while governments can only tax it away,” and while some government services are necessary, they always feed on the productivity of the private sector rather than creating value by themselves. This, Mazzucato says, is plainly false: a public library adds value to a community even if it generates no revenue, it’s just that the value cannot be quantitatively measured. Same with research at a public university. Same with public school teachers and firefighters and OSHA inspectors. The problem is that the value they add is qualitative, imprecise, and clearly value-based; impossible to measure quantitatively. Growth in market value, on the other hand, is something we can measure, even if that measurement tells us almost nothing about our actual well-being. (After all, a banana taped to a wall can fetch $120,000.) It’s easier to look at whether the little arrow of random stuff we measure is going up or down than to have a debate over what it is we really want. (The latter question implicates the entire meaning of life, which many people don’t want to think about, because it’s scary and the indifferent universe hands us no answers.)


Jason Hickel’s new book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World is a lucid, accessible, and crucial contribution to the debate over what we ought to value and how we ought to measure it. Hickel, whose specialty is rigorously debunking Pinkerian myths about the wonders of capitalist progress, is a proponent of “degrowth,” the idea that we need to stop measuring our well-being by how much our market economic activity expands, and instead make our economy the right size to fit our real needs and the finite resources of the planet.


Degrowth is a little bit of a misleading term. It implies that while right now our economies grow continuously, that growth is environmentally destructive, and actually what we need to do is shrink them all. But “degrowth” proponents are not in favor of universal shrinking, or of the shrinking of “everything generally” as opposed to a particular subset of things. Hickel does say that the ideology of limitless growth is irrational, and that excessive resource consumption in extremely rich countries needs to be curbed, but “degrowth” is not a kind of plea to return to nature and give up the wondrous benefits of technological development (you will pry my iPhone from my dead hands, though I will support any political platform that promises to abolish Microsoft Word). It is about having technologies arise as a result of some specific social need rather than because they make rich people a great deal of money. A social media platform should not exist to put eyeballs on advertising but to facilitate healthy communication between people. Degrowth is a plea to measure the economy more soundly, to pull back what needs to be pulled back, instead of just mindlessly assuming that more is better when, in many cases,
“less is more.”


Hickel asks us to think of the growth of economies the way we would think of the growth of a plant or a human. A human needs to grow, and grow a lot, from the time they are born to adulthood. But “growth” is not treated as the end goal, with “more physical human matter” being our measure of the quality of a person’s life. Infinite exponential growth of a human being would be a horrifying nightmare; the endless growth of animal cells is cancer, and it kills. Instead, we grow to the point at which we are “fully grown,” and then we stop (while continuing, hopefully, to develop intellectually and emotionally; i.e. in non-quantifiable ways).


Likewise, the poor economies of the world generally need to grow. But the rich economies should not continue to grow for growth’s own sake, if doing so is ultimately destructive and contributes nothing additional to well-being. Instead, economic success should be measured on a series of other criteria that may be correlated with growth but are ultimately indifferent to whether growth is great or small, positive or negative. Costa Rica has a longer life expectancy than the United States despite having a per-capita GDP 1/6 the size of ours. Here’s Hickel:


Over and over again, the empirical evidence shows that it is possible to achieve high levels of human development without high levels of GDP…. In theory we could achieve all of these social goals [health, education, employment, democracy, nutrition, social support, and life satisfaction] without any additional GDP growth at all, simply by investing in public goods and, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly.


In fact, as we’ve seen, because measurements of growth exclude a bunch of incredibly important things, and can include a bunch of socially destructive things, additional growth can actually be bad for people. Much of Hickel’s book is about climate change and ecological destruction, and the way the infinite growth imperative clashes tragically with the realities of a finite planet.


Hickel responds to the arguments of “ecomodernists” and proponents of “green growth” that limitless growth can be reconciled with environmental stability. In fact, he says, this is science fiction. It ignores the realities of what it takes to extract and use an ever-increasing amount of natural resources year after year. The word “new technology” cannot be used as a magical incantation that makes the material world disappear. Green growth proponents have argued that growth can be “decoupled” from environmental impacts: we can have ever-more goods and services without ever-more material and energy use. But Hickel cites research arguing that “decoupling” is ultimately impossible, and he debunks statistics purporting to demonstrate that limitless growth doesn’t depend on unsustainable resource use. Hickel is skeptical of those who believe we can reach “sustainability” without eliminating the unsustainable capitalist growth imperative itself.


The climate change and environment sections of Hickel’s books are distressing and do not make for easy reading. Importantly, Hickel stresses the fact that climate change is in many ways an act of theft from the Global South by the United States and Europe, because we have created the bulk of the problem but bear comparatively less of the most devastating consequences. In fact, as he does in his earlier book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, Hickel stresses the extent to which contemporary global capitalism is built on theft and violence: Britain likes to think it “developed” India but in fact simply extracted a vast amount of wealth from it illegitimately. The United States, as we know, simply expelled the Native population from its land (and then had the audacity to tell the world about the importance of private property rights). An important aspect of relentless growth is that it is usually brutal: the capitalist in search of profits thinks nothing of destroying a rainforest or blowing off a mountaintop or keeping laborers in slavery-like conditions, because after all, what the capitalist is doing is good by definition. We don’t price the consequences, and therefore we don’t value them, and that’s precisely how climate change has become such a mess: fossil fuel companies can knowingly create a giant problem for everyone else, but that problem is diffuse and long-term and hard to quantify and the precise scientific predictions have a level of uncertainty, so the companies in question don’t get sued out of existence for the harm they’ve caused. In fact, they prosper, and everyone is on their side: Barack Obama even boasted about escalating oil and gas production under his presidency because, after all, growth is good.


Hickel argues that many policy-makers and intellectuals have denied the scale of the climate change problem and the scale of the action that will be required to deal with it. Because the fundamental goodness of capitalism and the growth imperative are treated as articles of faith, there is a tendency to frame the question as “How can we solve the climate crisis without having to change the fundamentals of our economic system?” rather than “How can we change the fundamentals of our economic system in a way that helps us solve the climate crisis?” Debates on climate change policy are often based on the premise that we will accept any solution that doesn’t require us to do anything differently to what we’re doing now. By cordoning off all correct answers as prohibited, we have ensured that the problem is destined to remain unsolved. Thus, because it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” if stopping the end of the world required ending capitalism, well, so long, world.


But Hickel’s book is not actually pessimistic. In fact, it is profoundly hopeful and solution-oriented. This makes it far more appealing and worthwhile than doom prophecies like David Wallace-Wells’ panic-inducing The Uninhabitable Earth, which scare the shit out of the reader and then leave them feeling helpless. Hickel comes to us with radially encouraging news: the fact that it is not actually that expensive or resource-intensive to provide the ingredients of “the good life” means that we can, in fact, have a just and sustainable world. We are not locked inexorably into a brutal competition over scarce resources, where only the select few can live well and everyone else must suffer and perish, or labor so that those special few can prosper. In fact, everyone can prosper, if prosperity is defined rationally and we have an economy that is built to create that egalitarian prosperity rather than to help Jeff Bezos get ever-richer.


Hickel does not play down the consequences of human activity for the environment—far, far from it—but he does offer a rather beautiful vision of an alternative way of living. He draws from animism in his thinking about nature: seeing the world around us as alive and having intrinsic value, rather than as something inert to be conquered and subjugated. It’s important to adopt a new kind of philosophy, because at the moment, wild animals, being unpriced, are valueless. (Except to the extent that they can be sold and turned into pianos or pets.) Thus wild animals are destroyed by the billions, and their habitats paved over. Anything that cannot justify itself by producing market value can be destroyed. Of course, it’s harder to develop a new way of thinking with new concepts of value; “price as value” is a convenient way of evading life’s toughest questions.


Both Mazzucato and Hickel emphasize that the central problem is not that the economy grows, but that the economic system is irrational. Hickel says, “None of this is to say that growth is bad, in and of itself. It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism,” by which he means the absurd belief that growth is the end rather than the means. Mazzucato says we need to focus “less on the rate of growth and more on its direction,” meaning asking the question: what are we growing? Is it our health, the strength of our relationships, the richness of our culture, the quality of our meals? Or is it simply “the amount of stuff we use” regardless of what that stuff is doing to us?


I am not sure I like the title of Hickel’s book, Less is More, because while it’s true that less can be more—less work for the same money gives me more free time, less poisonous water makes children better off—it does make people feel like they’re going to have to cope with less materially than they have now. For some people this is true, but many readers of his book would, in an egalitarian world, actually end up with more than they have now. In fact, Hickel isn’t really arguing that “less is more,” at least insofar as that implies a kind of ascetic philosophy in which material poverty becomes spiritual richness. The actual argument he makes is much more complicated and interesting, even if it doesn’t lend itself as easily to a snappy book title. Roughly, it is this: an ideology of “more for the sake of more” actually makes us less well off overall, and in order to have more well-being, we need to have less of some things we currently think we need to have more of, while having more of some things we currently have too little of. (As I said, I see why he picked the title he did.) The ultimate implications are:


We need high income countries to scale down excess energy and material use; we need a rapid transition to renewables; and we need to shift to a post-capitalist economy that’s focused on human well-being and ecological stability rather than perpetual growth.


Could anyone looking at the climate data disagree? It does feel like the idea of perpetual growth is a kind of mental virus that has afflicted people in the 21st century. Hopefully it will be looked back on as a bizarre aberration, as future societies will think it obvious that we need to evaluate economic success according to a wide variety of normative qualitative factors. These factors will be “squishy,” in that there will not be a scientific way to resolve disputes about what they are or which should take precedence. But the idea that relentless accumulation and consumption are rational–while convenient for those whose personal interest is in relentlessly accumulating and consuming–is yet another example of subjective value judgments pretending to be Reason Itself. The “degrowth” philosophy, while misleadingly named (some places need to grow more, some to degrow certain things a bit while growing others, i.e. the United States needs fewer giant gas-guzzling trucks and more free medical services), is certainly far more sensible and healthy than prevailing economic orthodoxy. Jason Hickel is no primitivist, and degrowth is about being better off, not worse off. By having less relentless mindless growth, we can have more of those things that make life worthwhile but do not produce profits for capitalists.


I would like to see critiques of Less is More, and I am sure there is something in there for everyone to disagree with. But if everyone read it, we would at least be having a worthwhile debate on the right questions, like: what should the economy be for and what do we want out of it? How can we develop an economy that values unpriced things, like the natural world and personal domestic labor? How can we measure qualitative factors, and won’t any metric of success always be biased toward things that are most easily measurable? Can capitalism ever be “sustainable” or does its prioritization of short-term gain by individual private parties always come at the expense of the overall collective good? What level of resource consumption do we actually need in order for everyone to live well? How much is more than our fair share? What is the “right size” for an economy, if it’s not “as big as conceivably possible”? Hickel has answers to some of these, and I have my own, but the questions are not asked nearly enough. Degrowth is not really a particular prescription for the right amount of growth; it’s an attempt to focus our attention on the difficult matters that “growthism” overlooks.


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Richard Smith's non-medical blogs
Time for us to return to animism

https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/8489/

Our ancestors were animists, seeing themselves as at one with animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and seas. God was in everything. We now are dualists, thinking of ourselves as being not just separate from nature but masters of nature with animals, plants, water, rocks, and air there for our benefit. Our dualism extends to ourselves with our bodies separate from our mind. Dualism inclines us to seeing not only animals and plants but also some people unlike us—for example, indigenous people—as inferior, perhaps not even human. Dualism encourages us to exploit nature, pushing it to and eventually beyond its limits. If we are to preserve ourselves and our planet we must return to animism.


Jason Hickel, the economic anthropologist, traces the rise of dualism in his book Less is More, (1) the leading book on degrowth. I suspect that some philosophers would dispute how he tells the story, but it makes sense to me.


Homo Sapiens have been around for about 300 000 years, and for most of that time we were animists. Many indigenous people today are animists, allowing direct observation as well as paleolithic study of animism. Dualism first arose with the rise of cities, allowing some people the time to develop transcendental religions. The idea that nature is separate from humans and that nature is there for human benefit is nowhere netter expressed that in Genesis:


“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over everything that creeps upon the ground.”


Plato advanced the idea that the transcendental, the spiritual exists on a higher level than the material world. This idea was taken up by Christians with the soul being superior to the body and reaching heaven being the aim of earthly, material, and vulgar life. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, took a different view “insisting that the essence of things lies within them, not in some ethereal elsewhere, and that all beings have souls and share versions of the same spirit.” Roman philosophers followed Aristotle and saw God and matter as the same thing. For Cicero “the world is a living and wise being.” Many pagan cultures, including our Druid ancestors, saw the world in the same way, rejecting any difference between the sacred and the profane.


According to Hickel, animism and dualism coexisted until the 1500s when two major forces—organised religion and what we now call science—suppressed animism and promoted dualism. The church did it through the carrots of promising eternal life and providing physical comfort (the warmth, sweet smells, music, and art of churches) and the stick of burning heretics. Kings, who saw themselves as divinely appointed, supported the church’s view.


Francis Bacon (1561-1626), “the father of modern science,” advanced the idea that nature was separate, chaotic, and messy and must be ordered by man. “Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her,” wrote Bacon. Man through science should “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations. She should be “squeezed and moulded” for human ends.


Bacon advocated that nature could be thought of as a machine, like a clock, and manipulated like a clock. He was the first person to think that medicine should aim to hold off and defeat death, in contrast to his predecessors who thought that death was the province of God not doctors.


The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), building on the thinking of Bacon, argued that mind and matter are different, only humans have mind, and the rest of nature, including the human body, is unthinking material. Humans are separate from the rest of creation, a philosophy that came to be known as dualism. Descartes also saw humans, the only creatures with mind, as superior. This thinking became mainstream, with Immanuel Kant, often seen as the most important modern philosopher, writing in 1779: “As far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. They are there merely as the means to an end. The end is man.”


Hickel’s main task is describing the development of capitalism with its core belief in growth, and for him the intellectual triumph of dualism over animism is necessary so that we come to think of nature as an “externality” (economic jargon) that can be exploited without payment and with an unstated belief that we will never get to the end of it. Capitalism also needed labour (more economic jargon), and Calvinism developed Descartes’ idea of the dominance of mind to mean that work should dominate play, idleness is a sin, and productivity and profit virtues. (I feel that idea inside me now as I spend a holiday writing this piece. Hickel, a highly productive scholar, must be similarly infected.)


The mental habit of dualism allowed seeing many things as fundamentally different. Women, creatures with less mind (an idea still around today), could labour at home without pay. Non-Europeans could be seen as inferior, not even fully human, and enslaved and exploited, their lands taken away from them. Racism and colonialism have their roots in dualism.


Dualism, argues Hickel, runs so deep in us that we find it difficult to think in any other way, using phrases like “natural resources” and “raw materials. “The very notion of ‘the environment’ – that thing we’re supposed to care about – presupposes,” argues Hickel, “that the living world is nothing more than a passive container, a backdrop against which the human story plays out.” This, he suggests, is why we seem to be immune to the continuing evidence on the destruction of the environment: it’s it not us that’s being destroyed.

Science may have been a tool of dualism, but now it’s producing ever more evidence for animism: our DNA is very close to that of cucumbers and other animals and plants; with the discovery of the microbiome we realise that we are more bug than “ourselves”; consciousness may be nothing more than a function of the trillions of connections in the brain; and every ecological discovery—for example of the world wood web—shows the interconnection and interdependence of nature, with us part of it.

The best argument for being animists rather than dualists is that animism kept us in harmony with nature for 300 000 years, whereas 500 years of dualism have brought us to the brink of destruction. That, together with the science and justice that flows from recognizing our interdependence, is why I’m now an animist.

Hickel J. Less is More. How Degrowth Will Save the World.
London: Windmill, 2021.

Competing interest: RS is the unpaid chair of the UK Health Alliance on climate Change.


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Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex

Book contents
Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
New Directions in Sustainability and Society
Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene

Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Rethinking Economy and Technology
2 The Anthropocene Challenge to Our Worldview
3 Producing and Obscuring Global Injustices
4 The Money Game
5 Anticipating Degrowth
6 The Ontology of Technology
7 Energy Technologies as Time–Space Appropriation
8 Capitalism, Energy, and the Logic of Money
9 Unequal Exchange and Economic Value
10 Subjects versus Objects
11 Anthropocene Confusions
12 Animism, Relationism, and the Ontological Turn
13 Conclusions and Possibilities
Afterword
References
Names Index
Subject Index

12 - Animism, Relationism, and the Ontological Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2019


Alf Hornborg
Show author details
Chapter
Summary

In the previous two chapters I have critically discussed so-called posthumanist approaches in social science, and I have mentioned that much contemporary anthropology is committed to an outlook frequently referred to as the ontological turn. In a nutshell, most proponents of this outlook would argue that different groups of people may literally live in different worlds. In their view, there is no single natural reality to which our various perspectives refer, but as many realities as there are perspectives. They would argue that to posit a scientific approach to reality as more valid and reliable than traditional, nonmodern ontologies such as animism is tantamount to adopting a condescending, top-down relation affiliated with European colonialism. While such condescension and outright contempt for non-European worldviews have been abundantly illustrated in the history of scientific thought, the indiscriminate rejection of Enlightenment concepts of reason and truth cannot be an appropriate response. However, my approach to the far-reaching social consequences of artifacts such as money and technology suggests a concession that there are aspects of an object-oriented posthumanist ontology that deserve to be integrated into social theory. It is because of this conundrum that I devote so much space to the deliberations of posthumanists on the role of nonhuman objects in social life. As we have seen, there are indeed fundamental aspects of a “modern” outlook that implicate colonialism and should be rejected, but paradoxically, the identification of such points of symbiosis between Enlightenment science and colonialism is best accomplished precisely by applying Enlightenment concepts of reason and truth. While I share the anticolonial aspirations of so-called political ontology (Blaser 2013), I do not think that radical ontological relativism will help to expose the power structures and asymmetric resource flows that continue to underpin neocolonialism today.

Chapter
Information
Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex , pp. 208 - 230
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554985.013[Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019


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https://www.noemamag.com/degrowth-in-japan/

Degrowth In Japan


Mending the “metabolic rift” of capitalism.

Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine
ESSAYFUTURE OF CAPITALISM
BY NATHAN GARDELSMAY 5, 2023
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TOKYO — Decades after the supposed end of Japan’s “lost years,” the country remains on the cusp of degrowth. Its GDP expanded by a mere annualized rate of 0.1% in the last quarter of 2022.

While most economists thus regard Japan as the sick man among the advanced nations, Kohei Saito considers the trajectory of degrowth exactly where a healthy society ought to be headed when the world is heating up from overconsumption.

Saito is the 36-year-old author of “Capital in the Anthropocene,” which embraces degrowth as the way out of the climate crisis and anxieties of incessant competition that have driven so many sararīman to exhausted despair. Though an unfashionable Marxist, his book clearly hit a nerve, especially among the young, selling more than half a million copies in Japan.

This historically frugal island nation that emerged in ancient times from what philosopher Takeshi Umehara called “the civilization of the forest” would seem more fertile ground than most for Saito’s radical message to take root. Going back to the Edo Period of the late 1600s, the Tokugawa Shogunate recognized the ecological crisis of deforestation caused by the extensive use of wood for building. It severely restricted logging and massively planted trees to reforest the landscape. And, of course, the first international effort to stem global warming was called the Kyoto Protocol.

The Shinto and Buddhist sensibility that reveres nature as the oneness of all being is still evident in the gardens and shrines that punctuate the ugly concrete sprawl of rapid postwar modernization that spread everywhere during the 1950s and 60s.

It was in that period that the architect Fumihiko Maki and others launched the “metabolism movement,” which sought to integrate traditional spatial patterns into the design of megastructures and borrow ideas from the adaptive capacities of organic biology as a way to cope with the mushrooming density and congestion of hyper-urbanization.

Intuitively, they already understood in those days that the unprecedented scope of metastasizing development required a response that looked toward natural forms and systems.
Metabolic Rift

It is not so surprising then that it is a Japanese thinker as well who has retrieved the theory of “metabolic rift” from the more obscure works of Karl Marx. The concept is at the core of Saito’s effort to greenify the red hues of historical materialism.

According to Saito, Marx saw the interaction between the human species and its natural environment as “the basis of living.” By turning “nature” into a commodified resource to feed economic growth, capitalism splintered the balanced unity between human and nonhuman beings. That split is now manifested in the Anthropocene where the entire planet has been so transformed by this prevalent mode of production and consumption that the Earth’s livable biosphere is threatened.

For Saito, only a steady-state economy that foregoes the relentless reach for more growth and recovers the natural world as a public commons can mend the rift Marx identified. This reading would place the old master thinker of the Industrial Revolution in the ranks of later “era of limits” apostles such as Ivan Illich. The self-described archeologist of modern certitudes preached the “virtue of enoughness” and contrasted the convivial interdependence of social and natural relations with the ideology that perpetually contrives new markets by transmuting wants and desires into “needs.”
The Idolization Of GDP

What might postmodern degrowth look like in a place where the small spaces in which people keep their distance are dwarfed by Godzilla-scale towers that even these days are rising ever higher in inverse proportion to the shrinking population, where food portions may be trifling but everything from individual grapefruits to bento boxes are packaged in plastic? Saito’s views are downright heretical in the context of how Japan has measured its postwar success.

“We’re preoccupied with GDP ranking and growth, but GDP is a poor measure of a nation’s well-being and happiness,” Saito says. “Here in Japan, we have delicious food, the world’s longest lifespans, safe streets, and excellent public transportation, not to mention the considerable attractions of our culture and art. These assets aren’t reflected in GDP. The adoption of value indicators unrelated to GDP would be a positive step toward degrowth by itself.”
Read Noema in print.



This is a point well taken, though one can’t help but acknowledge that what differentiates the quality of life in Japan Saito cites from the decay and stagnation of a place like Cuba is the inheritance of capital accumulation.

For his own part, and true to his civilizational heritage, Saito has joined with other citizen activists to create the Common Forest Foundation that purchased land around Mount Takao near Tokyo to save the “public good” of forested areas from commercial development.
The Planet Vs. The Mode Of Production

I met Saito in Tokyo last week at the ceremony for the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Prize awarded to another, much older, Japanese philosopher: Kojin Karatani.

In his seminal work, “The Structure of World History,” Karatani flips Marx’s core tenet that the economic “mode of production” is the substructure of society that determines all else. He postulates instead that it is the ever-shifting “modes of exchange” among capital, the state and nation which together shape the social order.

For Karatani, historically cultivated norms and beliefs about fairness and reciprocity, including universal religions, compel the state to regulate inequality within the mythic commonality of the nation, thus tempering the logic of the unfettered market.

Despite modernizing on the Western model, the Shinto notion of “kami” — the inhabitance of spirit in everything from mountains to objects of human artifice — still echoes in Japanese culture. Perhaps as a result of being steeped in that animist resonance, Karatani’s original interpretation of Marx is that he did not so much materialize the idealism of Hegel’s “world spirit” as he saw “capital as spirit” vitalized by labor.

Marx’s main contention was that breaking the shackles of labor’s alienation from what it produces would be the motor of history that culminates in the realization of the world spirit. In Karatani’s concept, it is the dialectic of contradiction and resolution within his interacting modes of exchange that carries the spirit of world history along.

Saito challenges Karatani’s concept of modes of exchange because it does not incorporate their entwinement with the Earth’s ecosystem. At this historical juncture, he argues, it is, above all, the capitalist imperative of growth that is on a collision course with the planetary imperative of averting climate calamity. Thus, “if we want to properly analyze human interaction with the natural world,” he says, “it is necessary to focus on the site of production again.” As the less-known Marx understood in his idea of metabolic rift, it is the mode of production that alienates the species from the basis of living.

For Saito, the clash and reconciliation of these dueling imperatives will drive history going forward, just as Marx saw class struggle and Karatani sees the interplay of his modes of exchange doing so. In the Anthropocene, social and natural history have become fused and can no longer be divorced from each other. To put it in Hegelian terms, the unfolding of the world spirit is the realization of planetary reason.

Like Illich, Saito warns against the illusion that humans can escape the limits of our condition through a technological fix that somehow accommodates both “sustainability” and “development.” Inexorably, technology harnessed to the logic of GDP growth only further propels and accelerates the ruinous course we are already on, not departs from it.

The alternative to further empowering the GDP bulldozer would entail regarding the planetary ecosystem as a finite commons to be conserved instead of a resource to be endlessly exploited, and in which human flourishing is defined less by well-having than well-being.

It is a measure of how far we have strayed from an ecology of mind that such a vision seems impossibly utopian, even as we know that resolving the planetary predicament must take us in that direction.

Correctly grasping the dynamics that will frame our choices is the best guide to navigating the contours of the future now coming into view. In this, Saito’s perspective is a signal contribution.
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