Jason Hickel Profile picture
Apr 18, 2022 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
People often assume that capitalism is defined by "markets and trade". But markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is only 500 years old. So what is distinctive about this economic system? Three things (well, more, but three for now):
1. First, and most importantly, it is defined by enclosure and artificial scarcity. The origins of capitalism lie in a systematic effort by elites to restrict people's access to commons and independent subsistence, in order to render them reliant on wage labour for survival.
Over the past 500 years, this has taken the form of privatization of commons, forced dispossession, destruction of subsistence economies and - particularly in the colonies - taxing people in a currency they do not have in order to induce them to seek wages in that currency.
This continues today, with attempts to ensure an artificial scarcity of access to essential goods such as housing, healthcare, education, transit, and so on - goods that could very easily be provided, at high quality, on a universal public basis.
Where universal public goods do exist, these have usually been won by longstanding struggles by labour movements and other progressive forces (including the anti-colonial movement).
2. Second, capitalism is organized around - and dependent on - perpetual expansion, meaning ever-increasing production of commodified goods. It is the only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history (meaning it basically has a crisis if it doesn't continually expand).
Crucially, under capitalism the purpose of increasing production is *not* primarily to meet human needs, but rather to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. (It is also the main objective of innovation).
It's important to distinguish here between small businesses, which quite often operate with a steady-state, use-value logic (and which obviously preceded capitalism), and corporations whose main objective is expansion and accumulation (which define the capitalist era).
To sustain the process of perpetually increasing surplus accumulation, capital requires an ever-rising quantity of inputs (labour and nature), and requires that these inputs be obtained as cheaply as possible.
This introduces a constant pressure to depress real wages and attack environmental protections wherever possible (in the absence of countervailing political forces). The result is a system that, left to itself, automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown.
3. Finally, capitalism is notable for precluding democratic decision-making. Even in countries that prize political democracy, democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital.
The result is that decisions about what to produce, for what purposes, for whose benefit, and under what conditions are generally made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class (workers, the people actually *doing* the production, rarely get a voice at all).
It is worth pondering how our production priorities (and our treatment of labour and nature) might be different under conditions of economic democracy. Existing evidence suggests that democratic conditions lead to less exploitation, more equality, and more care for ecology.
In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently.
(The "more" I referred to involves exploitative relations of race, gender and imperial power, which are effects of the tendencies described here, and which sustain them, but this deserves a thread unto itself - coming soon).
We can have a democratic economy organized around meeting human needs at a high standard, where production is socially just and ecologically regenerative. Such a system is possible, but it will require a political movement to bring it into being.

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More from @jasonhickel

Feb 27
We have *extraordinary* productive capacities. We can do virtually anything. Renewable energy? Integrated public transit? Regenerative farming? High-quality affordable housing for all? DONE. But we are prevented from doing these things because they are not profitable to capital.
Medicines to end preventable diseases. Universal public healthcare. Insulated buildings. High-efficiency appliances in every household...

We live in a *shadow* of the society we could have because we do not have democratic control over finance and production.
We face mass deprivation, human misery and ecological crisis all around us. All of it totally unnecessary. And we are told to believe that this is somehow natural and "normal". It's wild.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 27
Major investors like BlackRock and JPMorgan have pulled out of Climate Action commitments because they can achieve higher profits doing fossil fuels and emissions. A clear reminder that capitalism cannot achieve green transition with the necessary speed. ft.com/content/ab26da…
Renewables are cheap. Rapid decarbonization can be achieved. But affordability and feasibility are not what matters to capital. What matters is profits. They will invest in whatever is most profitable, and all of us are hostage to their insane logic.
It is critical to understand: finance represents power over our collective productive capacities - *our* labour and resources. With these capacities we can easily solve social & ecological problems. But we are prevented from doing so because capital directs our efforts elsewhere.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 26
Did capitalist reforms reduce extreme poverty in China? New empirical data suggests the opposite. In the 1980s, socialist China had some of the lowest rates of extreme poverty in the periphery, while the capitalist reforms caused poverty to increase. theconversation.com/chinas-capital…
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Scholars have long argued that the World Bank's $1.90 method suffers from a significant limitation, as it does not tell us whether people can actually afford essential goods (food, shelter, clothing, fuel), whose prices may move differently to the rest of the economy.
To overcome this limitation, we need to measure incomes against the cost of basic needs. This is a more robust approach.

With this method, we see that China's public provisioning systems ensured that even low-income people could access essential goods.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 3
Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2023, on climate change, capitalism, colonialism, degrowth and post-capitalist futures. As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵
1) This one is my top highlight. Rich countries have dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5°C. In a zero-by-2050 scenario they will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. nature.com/articles/s4189…
2) Rich countries and elites are overwhelmingly responsible for excess emissions, but communities in the global South—and racially minoritized groups within nations—face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Read 17 tweets
Dec 28, 2023
Thanks to a lot of tech bros and economists getting Very Upset about degrowth, this article is now the number one trending publication at Nature. nature.com/articles/d4158…
I mean, the authors of this piece wrote totally obscene things like "Wealthy economies should scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being." Heretics, all.
But, but... but what about technology!

Yeah mate we like technology too. We also like a habitable planet. And we don't like imperialism. All of these things can go together. monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/on-…
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Read 6 tweets
Dec 22, 2023
"Those who wish to unleash technological innovation and production to achieve ecological objectives often hitch this dream to the wagon of capitalist growth.  But in fact capitalism and growthism *limit* what we can achieve."
jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/12/2…
"Scaling down less-necessary production liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization."
"A degrowth scenario is not a “smaller economy” (i.e., a low-capacity economy).  It is a high-capacity economy which is reducing less-necessary production, and therefore is suddenly endowed with spare capacity than can be redirected for necessary purposes."
Read 8 tweets

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