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Jason Hickel
@jasonhickel
Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE • Author of THE DIVIDE and LESS IS MORE • Global inequality, political economy and ecological economics
jasonhickel.orgJoined September 2011

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Is neoliberal capitalism really making the world better and better? Here's my response to the narrative promoted by Gates, Pinker, Kristof, Bono and the Davos set.
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On our latest episode, we take a look at The Neoliberal Optimism Industry and how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, lulling us into complacency and political impotence. With guest @jasonhickel. soundcloud.com/citationsneede
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The US has blocked and delayed climate action in part because oil markets underpin the dollar as a reserve currency. Transitioning away from fossil fuels will weaken US hegemony. They are apparently willing to harm the whole world to preserve it.
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To be clear, Bush's use of the term "our lifestyle" here is not intended to refer to, say, universal healthcare, education, affordable housing, nutritious food and strong community - all of which can be achieved sustainably. It is intended to refer to capital accumulation.
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“Our lifestyle is not up for negotiation." This has been the basic position of the Western ruling class on the environment since it was first uttered by US president George H.W. Bush at the UN Earth Summit in 1992. The sheer violence of it becomes more apparent every year.
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On December 4, 1969, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered by police. "We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism."
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So, focus production around securing human needs and well-being for all (with universal public services, public transit, affordable housing, a green job guarantee and living wages), cut the excess purchasing power of the rich, and scale down less-necessary forms of production.
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If we need to decarbonize the energy system extremely fast, does it *really* make sense to divert energy to supporting elite consumption? Or to the production of SUVs, fast fashion, private jets, or other socially less-necessary goods? No, it is irrational and dangerous.
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Here is a key principle: the more energy we use, the more difficult it is to achieve rapid decarbonization (and vice versa). For a good read on the distributional dynamics of energy use in climate mitigation, this is worthwhile:
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"But all we need to do is scale up renewables": yes, we must, but we also face a question of speed. To cut emissions in half by 2030 while maintaining current levels of energy use among the rich will require a rate of renewable rollout so rapid as to be probably unfeasible.
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Stopping climate breakdown is likely going to require constraints on energy use. Will the constraints be imposed on working classes and the poor (the default under capitalism), or on the rich and corporations (ecosocialism)? This question will define politics in the 21st century.
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Note these are not just primary commodities or agricultural goods; it is also high-tech goods such as computers, phones, cars. The South is home to around 80% of the world's industrial workforce. The majority of the USA's imports of manufactured goods come from the South.
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In the global North, 55% of all material consumed comes from the global South. In the global South, only 6% of all material consumed comes from the global North. Who's dependent on whom?
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The annual pay of CEOs is more than 300x higher than that of low-wage workers. But most people believe a "fair" level of inequality should be no more than 7 to 1, on average, while in many countries people want it to be less than 4 to 1.
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Public wealth in rich countries has declined dramatically since 1970, while private wealth (held overwhelmingly by the rich) has skyrocketed. UK public wealth dropped from 60% of national income in 1970 to -106% in 2020.
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Some striking graphs from this year's World Inequality Report. First, the bottom 50% of humanity has a *smaller* share of total world income than they did in 1820 (about half). Their share declined during colonialism and remains at historic lows.
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"The problem is elections themselves. We can make all the tweaks we want but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue w/ control by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments arent democracies; theyre oligarchies in disguise"
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The antidote to this madness is economic democracy. Right now decisions about what to produce and how to use resources are made mostly by the 1%. So, democratize production. Under democratic conditions people choose to focus production more around social and ecological goals.
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In this respect it is a wildly inefficient system. This is the sort of irrationality you get when production is organized around the interests of corporate profit and elite accumulation, rather than around human well-being and ecology.
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The problem is not simply that capitalism produces too much, but that it produces the wrong stuff: SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence instead of public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare. It overuses resources and still fails to meet even basic needs.
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In other words, the problem is not just access to the global product, but the constitution of the global product itself. Our capacities (labour, land, energy) are mobilized around producing SUVs, fast fashion and Coca Cola, instead of goods and services necessary for well-being.
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And of course it bears noting that their labour is overwhelmingly mobilized *not* to produce for human needs (food, housing, healthcare, education), but for corporate growth, such that even if their purchasing power is increased there remain critical shortages of necessary goods.
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The core mechanism of capital accumulation is that the majority of humanity must be made to consume less than they produce (or made to produce more than they are permitted to consume). And this constraint is imposed most violently on the people of the global South.
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It is clearly absurd to build new stadiums and infrastructure for every World Cup, with massive use of energy, resources and labour, in the middle of an ecological emergency. In a rational world, we would use already-existing stadiums.
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