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.
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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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 44 11 • view
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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 43 10 • view
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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 44 11 • view
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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 35 9 • view
Imperialism is not a side-gig, not an over-reach committed by greedy individuals, it is a structural feature of the capitalist world economy.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 37 6 • view
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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 35 7 • view
This was an extraordinarily violent process, involving colonization, dispossession, mass enslavement, and genocide.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 32 5 • view
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, ...
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 35 7 • view
to provide the ideological scaffolding necessary to justify apocalyptic levels of exploitation and bloodshed in the periphery.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 29 4 • view
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.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 26 4 • view
Wow, great thread Jason, thanks for sharing! I’d be interested to know your recommended reading on this subject.
aug 26, 2025, 8:31 pm • 0 0 • view
You can start by listening to Jason on this episode of EQUALS on how colonialism never ended: www.equals.ink/p/billionair...
aug 28, 2025, 9:24 am • 2 0 • view
His 'Less is More' book is pretty good.
aug 28, 2025, 9:37 am • 1 0 • view