Birgit Bohm

“it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being. If you grow your own food, clean your own house or care for your ageing parents, GDP says nothing. It only counts if you pay companies to do these things for you.”
― Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“All of this upends the usual story that we’re told about the rise of capitalism. This was hardly a natural and inevitable process. There was no gradual ‘transition’, as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful. Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies. It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes.”
― Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“The most important area of domination [is] the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“This is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World