“Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis!” bewailed the drunken Captain Boyle at the end of Sean O’Casey’s 1924 play Juno And The Paycock and so it still is today just over a century later. Climate change, species extinction, dwindling natural resources, deforestation, rising sea levels, over-population – all these things are dangerously in play and unless we do something about them it is unlikely too many of us anthropocenites will still be around in 2124 to muse over O’Casey’s prophetic words.

This at least is Jason Hickel’s contemporary thesis and he backs it up with a veritable avalanche of scientific and economic data. But he is by no means the first economic anthropologist to ring the alarm bell. Back in those faraway days of 1972 a report called Limits To Growth was published by The Club Of Rome and widely ridiculed for the nightmare scenario its visionary scientists painted. Today, however, very few experts working in the field of sustainable economics and ecology would dispute that The Club Of Rome’s major conclusions were incorrect, namely that nation states have become inflexibly wedded to the ideology of Growthism and GDP; and that If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to the continuation of sustainable life on Earth will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

The question that dominated my mind as I plunged into this compellingly erudite and lucid narrative was, “If the billionaire businessmen and authoritarian political leaders who determine most of civilization’s direction of travel took zilch notice of these warnings 52 years ago, why should they start doing so now?” Take Donald Trump, for instance, who has reversed many US environmental protection initiatives and loudly calls climate change, “The biggest fake news con trick ever perpetrated on humankind”.

Technology has advanced exponentially since 1972 even if economic literacy has stood still. In 2017 Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives when asked whether her democratic party, in the light of young people’s growing opposition to the destructive effects of capitalism, could stake out a vision for an alternative economic system, replied ‘I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is’. So Hickel provides us with a chapter entitled, Will Technology Save Us? That it will is an assumption many people have taken to making, including such luminaries as James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia Hypothesis and myself, a humble Manchester United supporter. But it rapidly transpires that every ingenious clean renewable energy strategy scientists have so far devised (and our author appraises a whole gamut of them) has dangerous blowback consequences for the environment or is just too little too late in the burgeoning crisis. If we want the transition to renewable energy “to be technically feasible, ecologically coherent and socially just,” he writes, “we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing aggregate energy demand at existing rates. We must take a different approach.” We must shift to a different kind of economy altogether. We must abandon the giant energy sucking machine that is hyper capitalism.

In the second section of the book we are treated to an extensive deconstruction of the capitalist system’s fallacies, foibles, paradoxes and myths. Who can deny the obscenity of planned obsolescence or that the extraction of precious minerals and commodities from the global south amounts to a continuation of colonialism by other means? We, who inhabit the so-called rich developed countries, are seemingly bound on a wheel of feckless over-consumption. We eat and envy too much, manipulated by deviously clever marketing men, and think far too little. At one point Hickel tells us we need to have an “open democratic discussion” about our manic consumer addictiveness “rather than assuming that all (consumer) sectors must grow forever”. But who in the mainstream is going to lead it? Starmer? Farage? Trump? Putin? During the Blair years we were told by a socialist apologist called Peter Mandleson that the government had no problem in people becoming “filthy rich”. And the awful truth is that, as Hickel keeps reminding us, the majority of the planet’s wealth is owned by a tiny handful of billionaires. They happen to control most media outlets and have no vested interest in promoting the kind of democratic debates that are required to enable the urgent radical policy changes our author outlines. A few centuries ago Parliament was dominated by wealthy landowners who passed the enclosure acts to replace subsistence farming with commercial agriculture and consolidated farming units. That’s how and why British capitalism flourished. Today global capitalism does the same thing but in numerous multi-faceted ways. It is hard not to conclude therefore that as a species we are kippered.

I just accidentally came across a quote from the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, during the Covid crisis when the vaccine was being rolled out. He quipped, “This vaccine wouldn’t be available if it wasn’t for capitalism and greed.” And Johnson isn’t even close to being a member of the mega rich elite. That’s how deeply people internalise the ideology of capitalism and its fallacies. I would argue that the human tendency towards creativity and innovation does not derive from self-interest, that it is ontological and spiritual in nature. Greed is merely an occasional toxic by-product.

As we arrive towards the final chapters the author offers us a trickle down apology that he isn’t a political strategist and that we shouldn’t underestimate the fierce opposition there will be to creating his model of a post capitalist world; after all, he adds as an afterthought, “our political systems have been completely corrupted”. Really, Jason, better to come clean late than never at all! This is where the book is weakest. Americans have simply got to prevent huge corporations and rich individuals lobbying and bribing the government, he argues. It’s slightly different in the UK. Veto Murdoch from owning half our media outlets, reform the city of London financial hub and kick unelected hereditary and Anglican peers out of the house of Lords. Job done!…. Well not quite. We might have to bang a few heads together in the World Bank and the IMF that marginalises the voting rights of the global south despite that sector having 85% of the world’s population. I imagine Lenin and Trotsky somewhere in the Afterlife rolling around with laughter at these jejune suggestions. “Billionaires of the world unite!” I hear them mock. “You have nothing to lose but your chains of companies and your off shore tax avoiding assets!”

I googled the question “Which billionaires actively support climate change energy policies?” and received a list of eight people that included Gates, Bezos, Musk, and Cannon-Brooks. I then asked the search engine which billionaires supported getting rid of Capitalism and this was the answer:

Several billionaires and high-net-worth individuals have expressed support for structural reforms to capitalism, primarily citing the need to address wealth inequality, climate change, and systemic instability. While few call for the complete abandonment of market systems, many advocate for “reimagining” or changing capitalism to be more equitable, a movement sometimes referred to as “stakeholder capitalism” or “reimagining capitalism.”

This time nine companies and their owners were mentioned, including Soros, Omidyar and Bill Gates again. There is also a group that calls itself Patriotic Millionaires who openly identify as “class traitors” to their own economic class. They advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy, livable wages, and a reduction in the political power of money. This then is good news. A green anti-capitalist fifth column does exist amongst the rich elite and our best hope is that they are politically serious about cooperating with each other to reset the levers of global power and not just idly posing like cosmetic show ponies.

We may validly ask next what it means to be “politically serious” about creating such radical change. This reminds me that I once got involved in a conversation with a young Tony Blair in the 70’s before he got elected to parliament. He rigorously espoused the Labour left wing’s “Alternative Economic Policy” which was dismissed behind his back afterwards as scandalously irresponsible by the rest of the LP members in the room. It’s easy to talk the talk in these matters. Self-interest and power is never easily conceded. Mao Tse Tung believed power only existed “through the barrel of a gun” while Lyndon B Johnson famously declared, “First get hold of a man by the balls, his heart and mind follow.” So I find it a limitation of Hickel’s thesis that he avoids this subject. Theory and praxis cannot be artificially separated without rendering both ineffective. Theory can act as a location for healing and transformation, while praxis ensures theory remains grounded and not merely “ivory tower” speculation.

In the final section Hickel reminds us about Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and describes how all organic life coexists in a complex and delicate balance. He questions the concept of individuality, because all species of life, however miniscule, have a right to be here, have a purpose to perform and depend on other species for their existence. It is not just a struggle to create a new economics, he asserts, “it is a struggle over our very theory of being” and requires “not only decolonising lands and forests and peoples, but decolonising our minds.” Certain countries like New Zealand have endowed their rivers and mountains with the legal status of personhood. Similarly we all need to return to an animistic way of viewing our environment and of treating what we receive from nature “not as a right, but as a gift.”

Less Is More is, then, as much a desperate plea for spiritual regeneration as for economic transformation and it deserves to be widely read. My heart is immediately very much with Jason Hickel’s argument although I recognise, alas, that my mind is unlikely to ever become properly decolonised in the way he advocates. It has been overcast for too long in the shadow of the greedy, stupid, brutish, cynical despots who rule over the planet. Trump, Putin and Xi are the big hitters in today’s geopolitical game, not Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon – so macho transactionalism rules virtually unchallenged. Hope of course springs eternal and I may well be unduly pessimistic, but right now ecological salvation seems to me as likely as Macclesfield Town winning the FA cup.

FOUR STARS