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.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

I strongly disagree with these remarks. They are empirically incorrect, but also illustrate a terrible reactionary tendency among some environmentalists that must be rejected. The claim is that ecological collapse will undermine industrial production, so we should not pursue development to meet needs in the South.

For instance, we should not ensure refrigerators for people b/c this would inhibit their ability to migrate away from uninhabitable zones!

In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵

nature.com/articles/s4146…
First, a crucial point. Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.

The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).

New paper: "How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?"

Is it possible to realise this vision without exacerbating ecological breakdown? Yes! But it requires a totally different approach to the question of growth and development. 🧵
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Some narratives hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the GDP/cap of high-income countries. But this would have severe ecological consequences. It forces a brutal dilemma between poverty reduction and ecological stability.

I'm excited to announce the latest release of the Sustainable Development Index, now with data through 2022. Costa Rica tops the list!

sustainabledevelopmentindex.org As usual, middle-income countries that have strong public provisioning systems tend to perform best. This model allows countries to deliver relatively high levels of human welfare with relatively low levels of resource use.

People would better understand North Korea’s disposition toward the US if they remembered that US forces perpetrated an industrial-scale bombing campaign that destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, civilian infrastructure, and 85% of all buildings. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were incinerated. The US dropped more bombs on North Korea in the early 1950s than they did in the entire Pacific theatre during WW2, making North Korea one of the most bombed countries in the world. You don’t easily forget such a thing.

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.

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.

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…
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.

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…

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.

"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."

People need to understand that the prominent writers, journalists and other civilian figures who have been killed in Gaza—including Dr Refaat al-Areer—were in most cases intentionally targeted by Israel. These are intentional assassinations of civilians, not collateral damage. Haaretz report on Israel's use of the Gaza population registry (names, addresses, relatives, etc):

OCHA report on the targeting of journalists in Gaza:

Targeting of Dr Refaat al-Areer:

...haaretz.com/israel-news/20…
reliefweb.int/report/occupie…

https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1733106399784169815

Capitalism perpetrates an egregious misallocation of labour, and prevents us from producing socially and ecologically necessary things. If we want to fix our broken world, we must gain democratic control of our productive capacities: Think about it: *we* are the producers. Nothing gets produced without our labour, our skills, our knowledge, and our planet's resources.  We have *extraordinary* capacities. Together, we can do virtually anything we can imagine.

This is exciting new research quantifying the material requirements of "decent living". It helps us answer the question, can good lives be provisioned for all while stopping ecological breakdown?

The answer: yes. 🧵pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… The results show that decent living can be provisioned with 6 tons of material per capita per year (the reference scenario), or as little as 3 tons per capita if we assume a strong transition toward renewable energy, public transit and plant-based diets.

We’re told that capitalism is all about innovation. But capital does not invest in innovations that are not profitable, even if they would dramatically improve well-being and ecology. The quality of innovation could be dramatically improved in a post-capitalist economy. One of the most obvious but obscene examples of this is of course the fact that, while renewable energy is increasingly cheap, capital doesn’t invest in it much because fossil fuels are substantially more profitable.