It is not necessary to be a Gramscian to recognize that the great success of cultural hegemony consists in imposing the logic of capitalism as the only desirable form of economy through the identification of that practice with prosperity, freedom and growth. Among the revealed truths of our world that are collectively accepted and repeated as articles of faith, none has more prestige than that which links material progress with social well-being and identifies the curve of economic activity with the arrow of progress. And yet, as soon as you stop to think about it, it becomes clear that capitalism’s legal tables are not flawed from the outset with a double crime: the colonization of bodies through human slavery and the plunder of the natural world. harms the environment through the indiscriminate allocation of its resources), but they constitute the most significant obstacle to achieving a more sustainable and ethically responsible and solvent world.
Just to invite us to this thinking against the tide, just to force us to trace the path of what is seemingly obvious and not subject to criticism (the equivalence between capitalism and progress, the overlap between developmentalism and welfare), in Less is More, Jason Hickel’s work, like degrowth, is fashionable today. It deserves attention that goes beyond its association with an existing movement. Considering the possibility of a post-capitalist world requires an a priori independent perspective, given what we have at stake. In fact, the revolutionary character of this book derives from its determination to mediate as Plan B pedagogy. Or, using the formula that Foucault applied to Delueze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus”: Here is the introduction to a non-capitalist way of life. .
The background on which the book operates is, of course, the ecological catastrophe and planetary collapse against which the Capitalocene is progressing at a dizzying pace. A catastrophe and collapse supported by single-minded practices, growth at all costs, and an understanding of life based on exchange value rather than use value; A dogma that forces us to live in a world where the majority of production has changed. Commercial goods have no purpose other than the satisfaction of human needs but the accumulation of profit, and this draws on the horizon the perverse truth that, no matter how little it is thought about, is the most cruel and silenced of paradoxes. Like any system that focuses on growth for growth’s sake, capitalism’s ultimate goal is not to meet our needs, but rather to keep the majority of humanity in a constant and perpetual state of necessity; Practices such as planned obsolescence, advertising dictatorship, property obsession, industrial giantization or commodification of common areas.