Winter’s Reviews > Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World > Status Update

On the mass increase of production: “Who would absorb all this output? The enclosures provided a partial solution: by destroying self-sufficient economies, they created not only a mass of workers but also a mass of consumers. People wholly dependent on capital for food, clothes and other essential goods.”

Additionally they destroyed the domestic markets in the Global South with asymmetric trade rules, making them reliant on these new mass-produced goods too. It collapsed the South’s share of global manufacturing: 77% in 1750 -> 13% by 1900.

Second change: labour organized around productivity and profit, no longer about self-sufficiency and satisfying needs. The start of capitalist myth (“the natural state of humans and their behaviors”).

The modern form of enclosure and colonization: “development” or “growth” -> can virtually justify anything as long as it contributes to GDP -> “growth always benefits humanity and is essential to the human process”