Israel bombed and murdered the Prime Minister of Yemen along with several cabinet members, and there is zero outrage in Western media… it’s barely even a story. The level of impunity is breathtaking.
Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE • Author of THE DIVIDE and LESS IS MORE • Global inequality, political economy and ecological economics
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Israel bombed and murdered the Prime Minister of Yemen along with several cabinet members, and there is zero outrage in Western media… it’s barely even a story. The level of impunity is breathtaking.
“6.3 million people are now skipping meals”. What the IMF is doing to Sri Lanka is actually barbarism. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...
Is ‘green growth’ just a convenient lie? @jasonhickel.bsky.social joins us on EQUALS to explain why rich countries can’t grow their way out of climate collapse and why justice means rethinking growth. Listen here 👉: www.equals.ink/p/is-green-g... #Degrowth #ClimateJustice”
You would have to reach back to the most violent moments of colonisation itself to find an act of dispossession on anything like this scale.
We have to understand structural adjustment, with its forced privatisation and dismantling of public provisioning systems across the South, as mass-scale dispossession and a transfer of wealth from the world’s working classes directly into the hands of international capital.
It is wild that the US and European governments that most vocally claim to support press freedom are openly supporting, arming and funding a proxy regime that targets and murders journalists *as a matter of policy*.
👉https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/why-does-the-us-support-israels-crimes
Israel is not an "ally" of the US. It is a proxy force. It is used to attack popular liberation movements across West Asia—and elsewhere in the global South—to prevent sovereign development and thus maintain the conditions for US capital accumulation.
These arguments have been established by a long tradition of scholarship -- WEB du Bois, CLR James, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, Utsa Patnaik, Ali Kadri, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and more -- and they remain as relevant today as ever.
The struggle against racism must be anti-capitalist, and the struggle against capitalism must be anti-racist.
Overcoming capitalism - in other words, transitioning to a democratic socialist economy - is ultimately necessary to end structural racism and imperialist violence.
Racism, like imperialism itself, is not a side-show to capitalism but a structurally necessary feature of it. It is not a standalone problem that can be addressed with a few liberal reforms here and there. It has always been central to capitalism and it remains that way today.
They used racial ideology to construct a global division of labour, a massively inequitable global division of wages, and a global hierarchy of rights. Racial ideology was promoted so aggressively that it developed its own momentum of hatred and violence.
And of course these very same discourses were deployed within the core itself, to justify paying lower wages to racialised people, and to deny them equal access to resources.
to provide the ideological scaffolding necessary to justify apocalyptic levels of exploitation and bloodshed in the periphery.
How could anyone possibly justify these horrors? Race. Discourses of white supremacy and racial hierarchy were fabricated by the European ruling classes to dehumanize the majority world, hiving them off from the realm of rights, ...
This was an extraordinarily violent process, involving colonization, dispossession, mass enslavement, and genocide.
Beginning in the late 16th century, the regions of what today we call the global South were forcibly integrated into the Europe-centered capitalist world economy as providers of cheapened labour, resources and goods.
Imperialism is not a side-gig, not an over-reach committed by greedy individuals, it is a structural feature of the capitalist world economy.
This is where imperialism comes in. As Utsa Patnaik puts it, capitalism requires “an imperial arrangement” to maintain access to cheap labour and cheap nature, and thereby to stabilize accumulation.
To avoid this outcome, you need some kind of “outside”, an external frontier, where you can exploit labour and nature with impunity, where you can externalize social and ecological costs, and where any rebellions can be destroyed with brute force.
This cannot be sustained for long within a bounded economy. If you intensify the exploitation of your domestic working class and resource base in this way, sooner or later you will face a revolution.
To maintain the process of perpetual accumulation requires massive quantities of cheap labour and cheap nature. You have to deny people control over their land, and deny workers access to the yields of their production.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs, or to achieve social progress, but to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.
Remember, capitalism is not defined by “markets and businesses and trade”. It is a system where production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big banks, large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investable assets.
Imperialism and racism are central to the capitalist world economy. The barbarism is a feature, not a bug.
This is the end of western liberalism. You can't support an openly declared final solution and continue trading on the same old lines about human rights, equality and justice. Gaza has driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of liberal ideology. My latest open.substack.com/pub/donotpan...
Amid international outrage, Israel is now claiming the double-tap strike on Nasser hospital was an accident—after celebrating it in Hebrew media. Drunk on their own impunity they take us all for fools. They mock humanity itself. Hell is not hot enough for these monsters.
China is much more efficient at converting production into human welfare than the US. China is currently increasing its investments in public healthcare provisioning, which it is correct to do, and I predict the social dividends will be impressive.
China spends 95% less than the US on healthcare per capita, but has a healthy life expectancy that is *4 years longer*.
"If we want real democracy, we need to extend it to the economy. That means overcoming the capitalist law of value and redirecting production toward social and ecological needs." Thanks to @rosaluxglobal.bsky.social for this conversation. progressive.international/wire/2025-08...
Torres was forced into exile, and later kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of US-backed Operation Condor. Operation Condor mobilized right-wing death squads to kill 80,000 leftist figures across Latin America.
and a record of the transference of funds to the coup-makers (history.state.gov/historicaldo...). The dictatorship, led by Hugo Banzer, banned all left-leaning political parties and arrested, tortured and/or killed thousands of political opponents.
In response, the US cut Bolivia off from international finance and planned a coup. Declassified documents include the transcript of a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, where they explicitly discuss the coup (history.state.gov/historicaldo...),
While in power, Torres sought to unify the working classes, teachers and students. He aligned with Salvador Allende and negotiated for Bolivian access to the sea through Chile. He reclaimed plantations and mines from US control, and called for the closure of US military bases.
On the 21st of August 1971, the popular socialist president of Bolivia, Juan José Torres, was deposed in a US-backed coup following his move to convene a People's Parliament of workers and peasants. He was replaced by a violent right-wing military dictatorship, with Nixon's support.
This suffering can be eliminated very simply by organizing production - our labour and our resources - first and foremost around human needs and well-being, using basic policies like public provisioning and price controls to ensure universal access to essential goods.
Extreme poverty is a condition of severe humanitarian crisis. It is not a natural condition, and should not exist. It occurs because, in our current economic system, most of our production is organized around what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for people.
This bears repeating: despite the massive productivity of the world economy, nearly one-third of the human population does not have secure access to food.
Given that secure access to food is central to the BNPL method, this suggests that post-2011 poverty trends have probably not improved much.
Third, while we don't yet have robust BNPL data after 2011, we know that food insecurity has increased steadily in more recent years, going from 21% in 2014 to 30% in 2022.
Second, poverty alleviation has not been steady. In the 1990s the poverty rate increased dramatically, during the period when neoliberal structural adjustment programmes were imposed on many developing countries.
First, progress is slower than we thought. Between 1980 and 2011, global extreme poverty declined by only six percentage points, from 23% to 17%. During the same period, the number of people in extreme poverty actually increased, from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion.
The BNPL data indicates that the story of global poverty over the past few decades is more complex – and more troubling – than we previously understood. There are three major findings.
This approach is known as the “basic needs poverty line” (BNPL), and it more closely reflects what the original concept of extreme poverty was intended to measure.
Scholars have recently developed a more accurate method for measuring extreme poverty. This is done by comparing people’s incomes to the prices of essential goods (specifically food, shelter, clothing and fuel) in each country.
A growing body of literature argues that the World Bank’s PPP-based method has a major empirical limitation: it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs in any given context.
We have this new piece in The Conversation describing recent scholarship on the question of extreme poverty, with Dylan Sullivan and Michalis Moatsos. theconversation.com/has-extreme-...
Yesterday in 1953, the US and Britain carried out a brutal coup that deposed Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular Prime Minister of Iran, beloved for his progressive and pro-worker reforms, because he sought to restore national control over the country's oil reserves.
New today: "Why does the US support Israel's crimes?" jasonhickel.substack.com/p/why-does-t...
Her name was Amna al-Mufti, age 11
UN data shows that in the US/Canada/Europe, about 8% of the population suffers moderate or severe food insecurity. That's 95 million people. Even in the richest countries in the world, capitalism fails to deliver something as basic as secure access to food.
why does the US continue to support Israel, despite condemnation from its own citizens and the world? Israel helps the US crush liberation movements in the region. and the occupation of Gaza upholds the structures of capitalist imperialism. @jasonhickel.bsky.social on the Better Future podcast:
This should be a wake-up call for India. The US doesn't care about India's development or its future. India should take this opportunity to align with China and other global South countries that are moving to break with the imperialist system.
for a discussion of capitalist imperialism and how to fight it, watch the full episode: youtu.be/MU1QdQsjGpM
liberals are committed to human rights... but their commitment to capitalism is a bigger priority. this is why, time and time again, liberalism gives power to the far right. only a broad-based socialist movement can get us off this flywheel. @jasonhickel.bsky.social on Better Future podcast:
Relevant details from the FT: www.ft.com/content/0894...
All countries should do this. This can enable much faster decarbonization, with less chaos and more stability.
There's an obvious solution to this problem: nationalization. Spain should create a national solar energy company and undertake the necessary development directly, totally irrespective of profits.
This is likely to happen elsewhere too. As long we leave the energy transition in the hands of capital, we are hostage to its logic.
Remember, capital does not care about prices, it cares about profits. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but they are not as profitable. So, capitalists are slamming the brakes on new solar investments in Spain, potentially threatening the government's targets.
As a result, energy prices have dropped. The FT reports that, during some parts of the year, energy prices are negative. This is great for citizens, and great for the planet, but bad for capitalist profits.
The story of solar energy development in Spain reveals something important about our current crisis and how to resolve it. Spain has achieved a massive increase in solar capacity in recent years, outpacing the rest of the EU.
New research shows that Israel's airdrops of aid in Gaza cover only 0.4% of what the population requires to survive. It is pure PR cover, with an approach that is designed to dehumanize Palestinians. euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6...
This is an opportunity for socialist politics to step into the void, to mobilize the deep currents of anti-establishment sentiment that are so prominent right now, and offer real solutions to the crises we face."
But of course the far right offer a fake politics, it is a cynical attempt to bring a certain faction of the working class on board with a project that is ultimately about further entrenching the class interests of the elite.
"I think what’s instructive about the current moment is that liberalism is collapsing. It has no coherent response to the social and ecological crises that we face. This is creating an ideological vacuum that is being filled by the far right.
We live in a miserable shadow of the society we could have. Our historic task at this juncture is to regain democratic control over our own productive capacities so that we can build a better civilization."
We are the people, we are the ones who produce the collective wealth of the nation. Right now we do not have control over what we produce, we are disempowered, hostage to capital, and unable to resolve the social and ecological emergencies that face us.
"All of this amounts to a totally different approach. It centres people not as guilty individuals but as agents of transformative change.
When socialism is the objective, we are in the terrain of class struggle, which is where we should be."
"... So it seems to me that degrowth will be a consequence of socialist transition. It’s the socialist transition we need to focus on achieving. The strategic benefit of this approach is that it clarifies the battle lines.
Degrowth should be understood as an element within a socialist transformation, as a corrective to certain productivist strains of socialist thought that are inadequate for our current moment."
So, what exactly is the theory of transformation here? The only way to achieve these things is through a movement for democratic socialism. That should be the movement.
but it is not a movement as such and does not have the capacity to achieve power and implement policies. We may try to convince existing incumbents to implement the policies we call for... but we have capitalist governments and they obviously won’t do these things.
"First, degrowth is often referred to as a “movement” but I think this is incorrect. Degrowth is an analytical frame that has convinced a lot of people, and has a lot of traction particularly among academics, students and activists.
But these issues are now increasingly dealt with, and major advances have been achieved, even if there is more work to do."
It did not advance convincing policies for how degrowth could be achieved while also improving well-being for all. And it did not sufficiently theorize how to overcome unequal exchange and imperialist dynamics in the world economy.
"But some points of debate have been really generative. People on the socialist left pointed out that degrowth, in its earlier formulations, had several shortcomings. It did not sufficiently center working class movements as agents of transformation.
"This is an important point. A lot of people get caught up thinking, oh, we are being attacked because the word sounds negative, we need a better framing, etc. No, it is being attacked because it calls for overcoming capitalist control over the means of production."
"The case for degrowth is extremely compelling. And once you start thinking, okay, how can we actually reduce wasteful and destructive production, and organize the economy instead around ensuring human well-being for all, you are in the terrain of socialist ideas and policy."
I joined @andrewonearth.bsky.social for this interview reflecting on degrowth, socialism, & political power. "Our governments are not dealing with the ecological crisis because they are capitalist. So, it is capitalism that must be overcome." breakdownjournal.substack.com/p/interview-...
why does the West start wars in the Global South? because capitalism depends on a constant flow of cheap labor & resources from the global periphery to the core. Western states start wars to keep prices low & protect capital accumulation. @jasonhickel.bsky.social on the Better Future podcast:
Understand that Israel assassinated Anas Al-Sharif after approving the plan to invade Gaza City. They knew he would not leave the city and would cover the assault and killed him ahead of it. Let’s just be very clear here.
Since you're here: 1. Why capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic: jasonhickel.substack.com/p/why-capita... 2. And why we need socialism (or, at least one reason why): jasonhickel.substack.com/p/climate-soci
88-91% believe that national shares of the carbon budget should be in proportion to population, and 72-82% believe that countries that have emitted more since 1990 should receive a smaller share. Source: wid.world/document/int...
Approximately 80-90% of people in high- and medium-income countries believe there should be a global tax on millionaires to finance low-income countries, and call for a global democratic assembly on climate change.
10. Climate justice. A WID study shows strong majorities in Europe and the US support high-income countries compensating low-income countries for climate damages, funding renewable energy in low-income countries, and supporting low-income countries to adapt to climate change.
9. Transformation of international institutions. In Europe, 71% of people support democratizing international institutions such as the UN and IMF with population-proportionate voting shares (in the US, 58% of people support). Source: wid.world/document/int...
Source: Energy Research and Social Science, 2023. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
8. Sufficiency-oriented policies. A study of European citizens’ assemblies found that sufficiency policies enjoy very high approval rates (93%). The study also found that sufficiency objectives achieved through regulatory policies had the highest support.
Source: Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2014. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
7. Reduced inequality. Data from 40 countries reveal that people tend to prefer relatively low pay ratios (around 4:1) between CEOs/ministers and low-skilled workers, dramatically lower than real-existing ratios. This conclusion holds across demographic groups.
6. Progressive taxation. In Europe, 84% of people support a global tax on millionaires (in the US, 69% support). Source: wid.world/document/int...
5. Living wages. Polling in the US shows that 72% of people support a living wage. In the UK, 87% believe that companies should pay a living wage if they can afford to. Sources: www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11...
4. Rent controls. Polling in the UK shows that 74% of people support permanent rent controls. In the US, polls in Massachusetts and California show majority support for rent controls (71% and 55% respectively). Sources: www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11...
In the US, 64% of people support universal healthcare, while 62-64% support a public option for housing, internet and childcare. Sources: www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11...
3. Universal public services. Polls show that universal public services are popular in the UK (substantial majorities want public control over healthcare, education, energy, rail, water, postal services, parks, etc.).
2. Workplace democracy. This study finds that US Americans prefer workplace democracy (where workers own shares, are represented on boards, and elect their managers), even while recognizing this requires more responsibility American Political Science Review, 2023 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
There are few policies that enjoy such widespread support, and research shows it can appeal strongly to working-class voters who otherwise feel alienated from the political process. Source: www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11...