Less is More? A review of Jason Hickel’s argument for degrowth.

In his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin Random House, 2020), Jason Hickel provides a fascinating account of what is wrong with capitalism and how a shift to degrowth will allow us to move towards a post-capitalist world. There are a number of critical assessments of climate change and environmental destruction. Hickel stands out, however, by the way he clearly locates the roots of our problems in capitalism and acknowledges that overcoming these problems requires nothing else than transforming capitalism. In this blog post, I will draw out Hickel’s major contributions as well as provide a couple of critical reflections.

Capitalism in the Web of Life: Jason Moore on the exploitation of nature.

With the global economic crisis being anything but over, there are continuing struggles over how to respond to economic stagnation. While the right continues to push for austerity and neo-liberal restructuring and a new extreme right combines this with blaming migrants for economic woes, the left envisages a new role for the state in reviving economic fortunes. As different as these positions are, what they have all in common, though, is this view of nature as an external resource. In his fascinating book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), Jason Moore critically engages with this understanding and contrasts it with a dialectical position emphasising the internal relations between humans and nature. In this blog post, I will provide an overview of some of the key aspects of Moore’s argument.