Quotes from

Jason Hickel's article

Some quotations from

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance

Posted Aug 30, 2019 by Jason Hickel

Originally published: Real-World Economics Review (March 19, Issue no. 87)

“A long view of the history of capitalism reveals that growth has always depended on enclosure. The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved by choking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressures for competitive productivity.”

“Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance.”

“Scarcity . . . creates recruits to the ideology of growth.”

“The only way to resolve the Lauderdale Paradox is to reverse it: to reorganize the economy around generating an abundance of public wealth even if doing so comes at the expense of private riches.”

“The literature on degrowth argues that it is possible to reduce aggregate economic activity in high-income nations while at the same time maintaining and even improving indicators of human development and well-being.”

“Wage losses due to a reduction in working hours can be prevented by increasing hourly wages with a living wage policy. To protect small businesses that may find it difficult to pay significantly higher hourly wages, a universal basic income scheme could be introduced, with dividends funded by taxation on carbon, wealth, land value, resource extraction, and corporate profits.”

“By expanding access to high-quality, generous public healthcare, education, affordable housing, transportation, utilities and recreation facilities, it is possible to enable people to access the goods they need to live well without needing high levels of income to do so.”

“GDP growth past a certain threshold tends to have a negative impact.”

“. . . people are required to work unnecessarily long hours to earn additional money simply in order to access shelter, which they were previously able to access with a fraction of the income. In the process, they produce additional goods and services that must find a market, thereby creating new pressures for consumption–pressures that manifest in the form of, for example, aggressive and increasingly insidious advertising schemes.”

“Ellen Eiksins Wood (1999) has argued that the origins of capitalismlay in the enclosure movement in England, during which wealthy elites - empowered by the Statute of Merton 1235 - fenced off commons and systematically forced peasants off the land in a violent, centuries- long campaign of dispossession. This period saw the abolition of the ancient “right to habitation”, once enshrined in the Charter of the Forest, which guaranteed ordinary people access to land, forests, game, fodder, waters, fish and other resources necessary for life. In the wake of enclosure, England’s commoners found themselves subject to a new regime: in order to survive they had to compete with each other for leases to farm on newly privatized land. Leases were allocated on the basis of productivity, and were reassessed at regular intervals. In order to retain their leases, peasants had to find ways to intensify their production vis-à-vis their competitors (with whom they used to relate convivially and in cooperation as kin and neighbours . . .)”

“The scarcity was artificial in the sense that there was no actual net depletion of resources: all of the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to them was restricted. Scarcity was, in this sense, created in the process of elite accumulation.”

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

“It was David Hume (1752), t-ough, who elaborated an explicit theory of “scarcity:”

“Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”

“They [colonizers] found that people were unwilling to make this transition voluntarily as they already enjoyed sufficient livelihoods, and even during times of drought had robust systems of mutual aid to ensure their well-being.”

“systematically dismantle the support systems that people relied on: destroying communal granaries, privatizing communal irrigation systems, enclosing commons that people used for wood and fodder and game, and taxing peasants into debt.”

“Scarcity . . . creates recruits to the ideology of growth.”

“Maitland, the 8th Earl of Lauderdale [who identified the Lauderdale Paradox] did point out that . . . colonialists would often resort to burning down trees that produced fruits and nuts so that local inhabitants wouldn’t be able to live off of the natural abundance of the earth, but would be compelled instead to work for wages and purchase food from Europeans in order to feed themselves. For the sake of private riches and GDP, what was once abundant and free had to be made scarce.”

“the growth of “private riches” has come to stand in for Progress itself.Meanwhile, conveniently–and tellingly–there is no indicator that charts the concomitant collapse of public wealth.”

“In the logic of austerity, scarcity and growth emerge as two sides of the same coin, just as during the enclosures.”

“where growth must happen despite a cap on throughput, and where all new value therefore has to be immaterial, capital would seek to enclose immaterial commons that are presently abundant and free (knowledge, songs, green spaces, maybe even parenting, physical touch, love, and perhaps even the air itself) and sell them back to people for money.”

“A theory of radical abundance”

“What would this look like? Let’s return to the example with which we began: the London housing market. Imagine if we were to even just partially decommoditize London’s housing stock; for example, imagine the government was to cap the price of housing at half its present level. Prices would still be outrageously high, but Londoners would suddenly be able to work and earn significantly less than they presently do without any loss to their quality of life. Indeed, they would gain in terms of time they could spend with their friends and family, doing things they love, improvements to their health and mental well-being, and so on. And by needing to work less they would contribute to less overproduction, and therefore ease concomitant pressures for unnecessary consumption.”

“The same logic can be applied to all social goods that have either been made to be artificially scarce or that would otherwise be simple to manage as commons. And here I have in mind not only healthcare and education, which are already generally well-recognized as public goods by most social democracies, but also other key goods that are essential to people’s well-being, like internet, housing and public transportation . . .”

“. . . by banning advertising in public spaces we could reclaim our streets (and attention) as commons and liberate people from the sense of scarcity that advertising induces.”

“While austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth, degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. Abundance, then, is the solution to our ecological crisis. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the 21st century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance.”

The full article: Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance