Jason Hickel introduces Degrowth – book review
<https://steadystatemanchester.net/2021/03/09/jason-hickel-introduces-degrowth-book-review/>
<https://steadystatemanchester.net/2021/03/09/jason-hickel-introduces-degrowth-book-review/>*Less
Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World.*
By Jason Hickel, London: Penguin-Random House, 2020. ISBN 978-1-786-09121-5
Mark H Burton
<https://steadystatemanchester.net/about/ssm-people/mark-burton/>,
Steady State Manchester.
Degrowth has arrived. It makes appearances in mainstream newspapers,
radio discussions and even the blog pieces of mainstream economists. In
the last year several books have appeared, one of them published in the
UK, by Penguin no less. This is from the LSE-based economic
anthropologist, Jason Hickel, formerly known most for his work on global
inequalities.
Hickel’s book is accessible and engagingly well written, with a good mix
of anecdote, facts and argument. The key issues are identified:
ecological overshoot leading to crises in the climate system,
biodiversity loss and the overstepping of planetary boundaries, taking
humanity into the dangerous territory of potential collapse of the
systems that we rely upon to sustain life. Hickel is very clear that the
overshoot is the result of the capitalist mode of production, itself
drawing on the history of colonisation, of nature, peoples and lands. He
identifies the contradiction between use and exchange value and the
connection between relentless capital accumulation as an end and the
growth problem. He notes that this endless expansion of capital is the
distinctive characteristic of capitalism. Perhaps surprisingly, he does
not identify its motor, the expropriation ofsurplus value
<https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/what-surplus-value>from the
labour power of workers.
https://steadystatemanchester.net/2021/03/09/jason-hickel-introduces-degrowth-book-review/
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