This article will be released in full online August 21, 2023. Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. "So how…
Gareth Dale Kohei Saito’s 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene became a surprise bestseller in Japan, demonstrating a wider thirst for anti-capitalist analyses of environmental catastrophe and a popular openness to degrowth-oriented solutions.
In contrast to the simplistic notion that capital unilaterally imposes consumption upon us, German scholars Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, authors of The Imperial Mode of Living, emphasize a dialectical analysis in which capitalist domination “draws on the wishes and desires of the populace … becomes a part of individual identity, shapes it, and thereby becomes all the more effective.”