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The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.

[Rebecca Solnit writes:] Our mutual friend the writer, filmmaker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.�� He [Graeber] texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so—I call it ��being nice to the reader,�� which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.�� […]

[Nika Dubrovsky writes:] David used to say that when writing in his mind he was talking to his mother, and if he felt that she understood him, he believed that others would, too. His texts were written to be open to discussion and further development by other people. He wanted to change our collective common sense, and this task can only be accomplished collectively.

As a teacher of economics, I have always believed that if you are not able to explain the economy in a language young people can understand, then, quite simply, you are clueless yourself.

I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane. So people write things about the origin of democratic institutions based on where they find the first written evidence for people sitting around making decisions together. And we have to pretend that before that they didn’t do that. It’s absurd. On the other hand, economists go all the way the other way. It’s all models. They don’t really care what’s there. They listen until they can have enough evidence to plug in to a model where they can show some signs that people are doing what they think they really ought to have been doing, and then they create a model saying they did that. I think anthropology is a happy medium. We can fill in the blank spaces, but we can do so based on empirical observation of what people in analogous situations actually have tended to do.

It touched a nerve. Limits to Growth exploded onto the scene and became one of the best-selling environmental titles in history, tapping into the countercultural ethos that prevailed in the wake of the youth rebellions of 1968.

Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re an investor. You want returns of, say, 5% per year, so you decide to invest in Facebook. Remember, this is an exponential function. So if Facebook keeps churning out the same profits year after year (i.e., 0% growth), it will be able to repay your initial investment but it won’t be able to pay you any interest on it. The only way to generate enough surplus for investor returns is to generate more profit each year than the year before. This is why when investors assess the ‘health�� of a firm, they don’t look at net profits; they look at the rate of profit �� in other words, how much the firm’s profits grow each year. From the perspective of capital, profit alone doesn’t count. It is meaningless. All that counts is growth.

Investors �� people who hold accumulated capital �� scour the globe in desperate search of anything that smells like growth. If Facebook’s growth shows signs of slowing down, they’ll pump their money into Exxon instead, or into tobacco companies, or into student loans �� wherever the growth is at. This restless movement of capital puts companies under enormous pressure to do whatever they can to grow �� in the case of Facebook, advertising more aggressively, creating ever-more addictive algorithms, selling users�� data to unscrupulous agents, breaking privacy laws, generating political polarisation and even undermining democratic institutions �� because if they fail to grow then investors will pull out and the firm will collapse. The choice is stark: grow or die. […]

Why do investors engage in this restless quest for growth? Because when capital sits still, it loses value (due to inflation, depreciation, etc.). So as capital piles up in the hands of accumulators, it creates enormous pressures for growth. And the more that capital accumulates, the more the pressure builds. […]

These are not ‘bad apples�� �� they are obeying the iron law of capital.

Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings �� we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

Growth is the motive Degrowth advocates assert capitalism is driven by �� and this is a key error. The assertion here is that motive dictates mode [of production], that because “humans are greedy,�� we engage in the kind of production our species engages in. However, the exact opposite is correct; the ruling motive is entirely downstream of the ruling interest. The current, capitalist mode of production contains a fundamental flaw that creates classes of haves and have-nots, rulers and ruled. The motive of the ruling class, the one that makes the decisions about what happens in society, is to preserve the concentration of capital through profit and/or ownership. Any change in motive Degrowth advocates propose without a change in interest, this would merely be symbolic. But Hickel doesn’t advocate for any change in ownership, so there’s no reason to believe Degrowth would be done in a way that is anything but exploitative, because if ownership isn’t addressed, exploitation isn’t addressed.

Here’s the key point we need to grasp: GDP is not an arbitrary metric of economic performance. It’s not as though it’s some kind of mistake �� an accounting error that just needs to be corrected. It was devised specifically in order to measure the welfare of capitalism. It externalises social and ecological costs because capitalism externalises social and ecological costs. It’s naïve to imagine that if policymakers stop measuring GDP, capital will automatically cease its constant pursuit of ever-increasing returns, and our economies will become more sustainable. Those who call for a shift towards well-being as the sole solution tend to miss this point. If we want to release our society from the grip of the growth imperative, we have to be smarter than that.

This is called the falling rate of profit. It is baked into our economic system. It is totally unavoidable. Because of this, it isn’t actually in the interest of capitalists to fulfill demand in the long term. In fact, if capitalists continually focused on supplying to fulfill demand, they’d eventually go out of business. Hence, degrowth.

Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.