Upstream - [TEASER] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

You can listen to the full episode "How the North Plunders the South" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. The imperial core—which is comprised of settler-colonial states like those in Western Europe, as well as states like the United States, Canada and Australia—have been stealing the resources and labor of the Global South—or the periphery—for centuries. It started with the direct colonial violence and resource exploitation that marked much of the last few centuries, but it didn’t end there.   Neo-colonialism—a term that you’re probably familiar with—is broadly defined as the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former colonies. But what does it actually look like in practice? How is the imperial core still plundering and pillaging the periphery? The practice of widespread crude, cruel, brute force that marked direct colonialism may not exist in the same exact form as it once did—but the outcome is still the same: mass extraction and exploitation from the Global South which has resulted in a staggering net transfer of resources, wealth, and labor to the Global North.  In this episode, we’re going to discuss the mechanisms and extent of neocolonial extraction and exploitation as they manifest today, and we’ve brought on the perfect guest to walk us through it.  Jason Hickel is a professor at the The Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the author of the books The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, and the the lead author of two papers that we’ll be focusing on today: “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015” published in journal Global Environmental Change, and "Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy" forthcoming in the journal Nature Communications. In this conversion we explore the theory of uneven exchange and how it sheds light on neocolonialism in practice, we discuss some of the key findings from Jason’s research on imperialist appropriation in the world economy, we dispel some of the myths perpetuated by those claiming that capitalism has lifted “millions out of poverty,” we talk about what a just degrowth transition of the global economy would look like and, crucially, how we might achieve it. Further resources: Jason Hickel “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015” published in journal Global Environmental Change Related Episodes: Upstream: The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets with Jason Hickel Upstream: International Development and Post-capitalism with Jason Hickel Upstream: How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel Upstream: The Green Transition Pt.1 – The Problem with Green Capitalism Thank you to Berwyn Mure for the covert art. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. So what we did in this paper is we looked at flows between the global north and the global south as groups and what we found is that every year the south does indeed net transfers truly massive quantities of value to the global north. We found a huge net flow of about 12 billion tons of embodied raw materials and about 21 exajoules of embodied energy from the global south to the global north each

year. Now these are huge figures and it's almost impossible to understand what they mean. So let me illustrate it by pointing this out. This quantity of materials and energy would be enough to provide infrastructure and supplies to ensure health care, education, housing, water, electricity, heating, cooling, induction stoves, refrigerators, public transit, computers, mobile phones, etc. etc. for the entire population of the global South. Ending poverty and ensuring decent lives for everybody, but instead it is siphoned away for consumption and accumulation in the core. You are listening to Upstream. decent lives for everybody, but instead it is siphoned away for consumption and accumulation in the core.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

The Imperial Core, which is comprised of settler colonial states like those in Western Europe, as well as states like the United States, Canada, and Australia, have been stealing the resources and labor of the global south or the periphery for centuries. It started with the direct colonial violence and resource exploitation that marked much of the last few centuries. But it didn't end there. Neo-colonialism, a term you're probably familiar with, is broadly defined as the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control

or influence other countries, especially former colonies. But what does it actually look like in practice? How is the Imperial Corps still plundering and pillaging the periphery? The practice of widespread crude, cruel, brute force that marked direct colonialism may not exist in the same exact form as it once did, but the outcome is still the same. Mass extraction and exploitation from the Global South, which has resulted in a staggering net transfer of resources, wealth and labour to the Global North.

In this episode, we're going to discuss the mechanisms and extent of neocolonial extraction and exploitation as they manifest today. And we've brought on the perfect guest to help walk us through it. Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He's the author of the books The Divide, A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, as well as Less is More, How Degrowth Will Save the World. He's also the lead author of two papers that we'll be focusing on today. Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy, Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1990-2015, published in the journal Global Environmental

Change and Unequal Exchange of Labor in the World Economy, forthcoming in the journal Nature Communications. In this conversation, we explore the theory of uneven exchange and how it sheds light on neocolonialism in practice. We discuss some of the key findings from Jason's research on imperialist appropriation in the world economy. We dispel some of the myths perpetuated by those claiming that capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty.

We talk about what a just degrowth transition of the global economy would look like and, crucially, how we might achieve it. And now, here's Robert in have you back on the show. Thanks very much. Yeah, Robert, good to be with you. You've been on the show a few times now, and I don't remember the exact number of times, but definitely a few times, and you were actually one of our earliest guests going back to, I think it was

like 2017. I remember distinctly Della and I were in the UK and I remember hauling all of my equipment up to your top story office. I think it might have been at LSE. Yeah, that was at LSE. It was a tiny office at the very top of this old building. I remember. So that was when we first met and that was a really great interview on your book, The Divide. And we've had you on several times to discuss your work since then. And so yeah, it's really great to have you back. And I'm wondering just in case, you know, some of the listeners today haven't listened to any of our past episodes with you or may not be familiar with your work. If you could just introduce yourself and yeah, maybe just talk a little bit about the work that you do.

Yeah, no problem. So I'm a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. And I'm also affiliated with the London School of Economics, where I also worked for a long time, which is where we first met. My research focuses mostly on global political economy and imperialism and ecological economics and eco-socialism. And I also do work on degrowth, which I see is kind of part of this broader package. And I've published several books on these topics, including The Divide, which you mentioned, and then also more recently, Less Is More, which is about degrowth.

And we discussed your book, Less Is More, both in a conversation that we have with you, but you were also featured prominently in our Green Transition audio documentary series. So if folks wanna dive in deeper to some of that work, and we're gonna touch on it today, but if you wanna dive deeper, definitely check out those past episodes and documentaries. But yeah so today we're going to focus on a paper that you co-authored as the lead author

with Christian Doerringer, Hans-Peter Weiland, I believe, Weileland, and you can correct me later if you want, and Intan Suwandi, published in the Journal of Global Environmental Change, and the paper is titled, Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy, Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, from 1990 through 2015. And we'll be talking about some of your other related research as well, but we're going to start with focusing on that paper. And I think all of this research is incredibly important, especially in light of some of the debates that are taking place right now on the left, which actually we explored in our recent Patreon episode between the broader degrowth tendency on the left and that of what's sort of come to be known as left eco-modernism. So before we

dive into the findings from that paper I'm wondering if you can set us up a bit by just explaining what unequal exchange is and why it's important to understand the extent of unequal exchange between the core and the periphery. And I'm just thinking too, maybe even unpacking the terms core and periphery briefly for folks who may not be familiar with them. Well, first of all, I'm super excited to talk about unequal exchange because I think it's actually like a fundamental crucial concept for us to understand how the world economy works and especially for any kind of leftist or Marxist analysis of our current moment. The concept was originally developed kind of most clearly, I guess, in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of Marxist economists who were associated with dependency

theory and world system theory, mostly people in Latin America and North Africa. And probably the most famous thinkers in that field were like the Egyptian economist Samir Amin, the Brazilian economist Roy Mauro Marini, and then also Aguirre Emmanuel, who was a French economist who was really closely connected to third world struggles in the 20th century. And their basic point was actually pretty simple. They pointed out that, look, okay, we know, it's very obvious that during the colonial period, the Imperial Corps, which is basically Western Europe and its main settler colonial outposts, right, like the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. During the colonial period, the Imperial Corps relied heavily on a massive direct appropriation of resources and

labor from the periphery, that being the global South, right? The rest of Latin America and Asia and Africa. Things like massive use of their lands, production of sugar, cotton, timber, grain, huge quantities of labor, including massive amounts of enslaved labor and indentured labor. All of this appropriation from the colonies was crucial to enabling the rising levels of consumption and accumulation that the core enjoyed during the colonial period. So these are basically like direct transfers of value from the colonies to the metropole, right? But what these theorists wanted to argue was that this basic dynamic of colonial appropriation continued to occur even after the colonies achieved formal

political independence. And it happens, they argued, because of the systematic price inequalities in international trade. So for various reasons, which we can talk about, the prices of labor and resources and goods in the global South are systematically lower than they are in the global North, even when we account for productivity differences and skill differences and stuff like that. Now, this is important because when it comes to international trade, we know that all imports have to be paid for with exports. Right? But if you have a situation of large price inequalities, it means that for every units that you're importing,

you have to export many more units to pay for it. And so this leads to what they call the kind of hidden transfer of value that flows, that gushes from the global south to the global north. And it's hidden because it looks like there's a kind of monetary balance of trade, right? Like the monetary side of the trade is balanced.

But underneath that monetary balance, we can see that the south is actually sending a net transfer of real value to the global North. And this basically enriches the core economies, but drains the periphery of resources and labor that are really essential for development. So I guess another way to state it is even more simply to say that the global South consumes less than it produces, and the global North consumes more than it produces and the global north consumes more than it produces and Samir

Amin and his group basically saw this as the key explanation for uneven development and inequality in the world economy which remains with us today. And this is different like you mentioned it's different from the way that exploitation of the global south happened during like explicitly during the colonial period because there's not the same necessarily exploitation of resources directly. Is that true? Yeah, basically like in the existing world economy, it looks like you're having voluntary trade, right? In the same way that like in your national economy, it looks like everyone's kind of voluntarily signing up to do jobs for wages and therefore what they receive is fair

according to the market wage and the boss just happens to be appropriating lots of extra surplus because I don't know, you know, they deserve it or whatever, right? It sort of seems natural but Marxists know that it's not. It's a result of power imbalances in the economy, etc. And the same thing is basically true for the way that unequal exchange happens today. Like the international trade system looks fair at first glance because it's happening voluntarily, there's no like occupation of colonial territory and direct appropriation of the resources, etc. etc. But beneath the veneer of what seems like a fair exchange is continued appropriation. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Jason Hickel. You can listen to the full episode

by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, not only will you get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, as well as early access to certain episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to, but you'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com UpstreamPodcast.com or at UpstreamPodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.