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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Mar 10

US politicians commonly claim that the US has been a "beacon of democracy" for the past 250 years, at home and abroad. Let's have a look a the evidence. 🧵 Links at the end.

The US was an apartheid regime at its founding, and governed as an oligarchy.

US states generally limited voting to white males who owned property (about 6% of the population). Working class people, women, and people of colour overwhelmingly did not have the right to vote.

Virtually all Black people (some 20% of the US population) were subject to mass enslavement and had no rights whatsoever, and Indigenous Americans were targets of government-sponsored ethnic cleansing and genocide.

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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Feb 16

Social democracy is not a viable alternative to capitalism. It is a tempting prospect, but ultimately suffers from violent contradictions that cannot be sustained.

Social democracy tries to establish a compromise between (a) capitalism, and (b) socialist demands for fair wages, good public services, and environmental protections. But the latter represents a real problem for capital. It increases input prices, and increases workers’ bargaining power, and makes capital accumulation very difficult to achieve.

One way to resolve this tension is to abandon capital accumulation and transition to a post-capitalist economy where production is democratically organized around human well-being and ecology (in other words, socialism).

But social democracy, which is ultimately committed to capitalism, takes a different approach. It resolves the tension through imperialism. Social democratic states appropriate cheap labour and nature from the global South, from an external “outside”, thus allowing them to offer good wages and public services at home while also maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation.

Even states that may seem neutral or benevolent, like some of the Scandinavian countries, benefit from a massive net-appropriation of labour and resources from the global South through dynamics of unequal exchange, which enables them to sustain the social democratic compromise.

Crucially, while this option is available to states in the imperial core, it is generally not available to states in the periphery. In the periphery, when capitalists face progressive demands from unions and environmental defenders, they don’t have the option of conceding and then relying on imperialist appropriation to maintain accumulation. There is no “outside” for them. Their only option is to crush the progressive demands. Indeed they often do this with the direct support of the core states.

This is why so many capitalist states in the South are characterized by violence and repression. It is not because they are somehow intrinsically given to violence… it is because capitalism *requires* violence. By contrast, the core states can have nice human rights at home because they externalize the violence that capitalism requires.

Social democracy offers only the illusion of a solution. An illusion for some, that is. The Congolese coltan miners and Bangladeshi sweatshop workers that supply Western multinational firms are of course under no such illusion.

The only real solution is to overcome capitalism and achieve a post-capitalist economy. It is 100% possible to have a functioning economy that ensures human well-being and ecological stability *without* needing imperialism. But it requires abandoning capital accumulation.

"The North net-appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw materials, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour from the global South in a single year": sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

"In 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices." nature.com/articles/s4146…

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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Jan 21

China is overturning mainstream development theory in astonishing ways.

China's GDP per capita is only $12,000. That's 70% less than the average in high-income countries.

And yet they have the largest high-speed rail network in the world. They've developed their own commercial aircraft. They are the world leaders in renewable energy technology and electric vehicles. They have advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, aerospace engineering...

China has a higher life expectancy than the USA, with 80% less income.

We were told that this kind of development required very high levels of GDP/cap. But over the past 10 years China has demonstrated that it can be achieved with much more modest levels of output.

How do they do it? By using public finance and industrial policy to steer investment and production toward social objectives and national development needs. This allows them to convert aggregate production into development outcomes much more efficiently than other countries, where productive capacity is often wasted on activities that may be highly profitable to capital, or beneficial to the rich, but may not actually advance development.

Of course, China still has development gaps that need to be addressed. And we know from some other countries that higher social indicators can be achieved with China's level of GDP/cap, by focusing more on social policy. But the achievements are undeniable and development economists are taking stock.

I saw some US neoliberal commentator argue that China's industrial policy and credit guidance is a constraint on development. This is just total denialism. Whatever your ideological priors, the reality is that China's industrial policy is *extremely* effective.

But I will also say this again, which I have said several times before... while China's efficiencies in converting aggregate output into development outcomes are impressive, they still suffer substantial ecological inefficiencies. There are several countries in the global South that achieve better social indicators than China not only with similar GDP/cap (as I mentioned above) but with substantially less material and energy use per capita.

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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Jan 2

Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2024, on unequal exchange, ecosocialism, and post-capitalist transformation.

As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵

1) This is my top highlight. We found that the global North net-appropriates more than 800 billion hours of labour from the South per year. This occurs because Southern wages are 83–98% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill in the same sector. nature.com/articles/s4146…

2) Around 80% of humanity lives in conditions of deprivation. But this scarcity is artificial. If we directed production toward meeting human needs rather than mindlessly pursuing capitalist growth, we could ensure good lives for 8.5 billion people👇 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Nov 24, 2024

People often assume that capitalist globalization is closing the wage gap between workers in the global North and global South.

But it's not happening. In fact, the North-South wage gap is *increasing*.

And this is not due to sectoral differences. It is occurring across all sectors, even as the global South's share of industrial manufacturing and high-skilled labour in the world economy has increased dramatically over this very period.

Source: nature.com/articles/s4146…

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Jason Hickel

@jasonhickel

Oct 31, 2024

This Bloomberg report is a stark reminder: we cannot rely on capital to achieve green transition. Capital is not investing enough in green energy because it's not as profitable as fossil fuels. The solution? We need a public finance strategy and fast.

bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-…

Public finance, together with a credit guidance framework. Central banks have the power to force capital to stop making climate-destroying investments and direct investment instead in necessary activities: foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/16/cli…

People assumed that renewable energy development would increase once it became cheaper than fossil fuels. But capital doesn't care about cheapness. It cares about *profits*. Capital won't invest when the outlook is like this. You need to make the necessary investments directly.

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