Table of Contents
Introduction
A. Overview
This is a “clean verbatim transcript” of this edited 06:14 video of Professor Jason Hickel talking from Transnational Institute.
Here is the pull quote from the first part of the video which I will put here and not at the beginning of the transcript, so it is not repetitive within the transcript itself:
A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the Core really faces a crisis and they will not let that happen.
The open captions that they added for this video are well done with great color contrast!
B. Transcript Author’s Notes
The type of edits I did for this “clean verbatim” transcript:
- added paragraphs and headers where I thought useful or appropriate.
- removed general repeated phrases such as “, right?” at the end of sentences and the “And, ” at the beginning of some sentences. I keep these in the beginning so you can get a feel for his cadence for these, and then I start removing them.
- Because this is an edited video with jump cuts, I did add in some extra explanatory text [within brackets] where the jump was a little too abrupt or where clarity would be useful.
- I added in a list or two as well, but I tried to not go overboard, as I am wont to do as a listophile.
C. Definitions
Here are some useful definitions, from my own perspective that might be useful for some to know. This is how I define these terms and not necessarily how Professor Jason Hickel defines them:
- Global North or Imperial Core – refers to the mostly “white” Europe, North America, and Australia.
- Global South or Imperial Periphery – refers to predominately “not white” everyone else, but specifically Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia
The Video
Transcript
A. Capitalist Imperialism and Colonialism of the Global North
It’s funny, like I’m always asked to talk about ecology, when really what I want to talk about is Capitalist Imperialism. And, the two are just a piece of the same problem, right? The ecological crisis is ultimately playing out along colonial lines, right? We know that it is the countries of the Imperial Core that are overwhelmingly responsible, and specifically their ruling classes who control the means of production and energy systems and investment, etc…, are overwhelmingly responsible for the excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown, right? We know that’s a fact.
We also know it’s a fact that the Global South suffers the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown, right? The people who have contributed literally nothing to the crisis whatsoever, not contributed a small amount, contributed nothing, right?
B. Excess Materials of the Global North Appropriated from the Global South
And, it’s not just climate breakdown that we face. There’s also other dimensions of the ecological crisis. And, here too we see the same thing playing out. When it comes to excess material use in the world economy, overwhelmingly, it’s due to excess material use and accumulation in the Imperial Core. Half of the material use that’s used in the [Imperial] Core is net appropriated from the [Imperial] Periphery, from the territories of the Global South, which causes severe damage. You don’t see this damage in Sussex or in Finland. You see it in the Congo. You see it in Indonesia, right? You see it in Bolivia, in the frontiers of extraction.
The [Imperial] Core benefits and everyone else suffers. The ecological crisis represents processes of colonization and appropriation, and also is a disaster that’s playing out along colonial lines. I think that’s really important to spell out. And, if we’re not attentive to those colonial dimensions, I really think we’re fundamentally missing the point.
C. The Paradox of Incredible Productive Capacity vs Mass Deprivation
The other thing I want to point out here is that: we’re in this incredible paradox where the world economy is just massively productive, like our productive capacities are incredible. Think of the scale of the labor that humanity has at its disposal, the resources, the technology, the factories, the energy, the materials. Incredible amounts of production to the point of breaking past ecological limits. And, yet the vast majority of the human population lives in conditions of massive deprivation. 80% of the population can’t meet basic needs.
So, what explains this incredible paradox? It’s, ultimately, our system of production. The social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of production, Capitalism, where our incredible productive capacities are organized overwhelmingly around what is most profitable to capital and what can most facilitate accumulation in the [Imperial] Core, rather than what is obviously necessary to meet human needs and achieve our ecological objectives.
So, we’re in this wild place we’re just like:
- “Oh, solving poverty is just going to take Generations!”
- “If we’re lucky we’ll get people above $1.90 a day by the end of the century!”
- “The climate crisis? Who can figure out how to solve this? It seems intractable!”
None of this is true. It’s lies. These are problems that can be very easily solved and very quickly.
D. The Antidote: Economic Democracy
The problem is that we don’t have control over our own productive capacities, because we don’t have an economic democracy. Some of us live in political democracies where, from time to time, we get to elect government officials. But when it comes to the economic system, not even the pretense of democracy is allowed to exist. And, that is ultimately the contradiction we face. This is a crisis that, at its root, is about Capitalism and can only be resolved by overcoming that fact.
The antidote to Capitalism is Economic Democracy: that we should have collective democratic control over what we are producing, what the goals of our production are, who benefits from our production, and so on. And, when we do, we can solve these problems quickly? We know exactly what to do. The problem is we don’t have the power. So, I think that in the face of this crisis, we have to have clarity about what has to be achieved and we have to start building the movements that are capable of achieving that.
E. Sovereignty for the Global South
For the South there’s another element I think we have to pay attention to which is that: they need economic sovereignty. They need economic liberation at a national level first. The Global North is overwhelmingly responsible for the [climate] crisis, but the Global South also needs to engage in ecological planning, energy transition, etc.
How does anyone expect them to do that when they do not have sovereign control over:
- their own resources
- their own labor
- their own lands
- their own energy
[The Global South is] under the thumb of structural adjustment programs [from the Global North] that prevent them from using progressive industrial policy, prevent them from using progressive fiscal policy, prevent them from using progressive monetary policy. Basic tools that we know can allow them to achieve developments and ecological transition [that] they are effectively denied from using.
F. Liberation of the Global South is Antithetical to the Colonial Capitalist Policies of the Global North
What is the solution to that for the [Global] South in its struggles for economic liberation? Now, I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that a struggle for economic liberation in the [Global] South is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist world economy. Because, accumulation in the [Imperial] Core depends utterly on the cheapening of labor and resources in the Global South. It depends utterly on that and has for the past 500 years. So, any attempt by liberation struggles in the [Imperial] Periphery to achieve economic independence, to use their own resources for their own development, for their own ecological transition, for their own human needs is destabilizing for capital in the [Imperial] Core.
And, capital reacts with the most extraordinary violent backlashes. We see it happening all the time. Now it is Palestine. Before it was:
- Libya,
- Iraq,
- Chile,
- Indonesia,
- Congo.
It will never stop. It’s over and over again.
I think the situation in Palestine right now, we have to understand is not primarily a moral one. That’s how we think of it. That is not how capital thinks of it. For them it is a matter of suppressing and crushing liberation movements. Because a liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means Capitalism in the [Imperial] Core really faces a crisis and they will not let that happen. They’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t. So, I think that’s really what we face. It’s the world system dimension of the of the violence that we’re seeing. We have to be cognizant of that. And, our struggles and our resistance have to be in proportion.
