Upstream - The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets with Jason Hickel

Episode Date: May 23, 2017

In this Conversation we spoke with Jason Hickel, an anthropologist formerly at the London School of Economics and now at Goldsmiths University of London. Originally from Swaziland, Jason's research has focused on a critique of development and globalization. He has also written on the topics of inequality, climate change, basic income, and soil regeneration. Jason argues that we cannot begin to seriously tackle the climate crisis until we take a hard look at the growth-dependent economic system that drives fossil fuel production and consumption. He believes that simply regulating fossil fuels is not enough, and that in order to truly address climate change we'll need to move away from our current capitalist economic model, a model which can only function properly when it is growing exponentially. We also spoke with Jason about his fascination at capitalism's extraordinary ability to co-opt and commodify its own critique. How does Tom's Shoes allow you to purchase your redemption from being a consumer? How are hipster bars and clubs in cities like London and New York appropriating the aesthetic of working class neighborhoods while remaining closed off to these very communities? How does this dynamic play out in the environmental movement? Jason provides a number of interesting examples that demonstrate why this process is incredibly harmful to building a true resistance to capitalism. Our conversation took many turns, exploring what 21st century socialism might look like, the myths of international development, and more. Jason is a natural systems-thinker, and his upstream perspective is an incredibly important one.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. 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.

We see all these hungry and dying people and we feel compelled to reach out out of our charity and try to help them, but we completely avoid any consideration, any intellectual engagement with the upstream causes of their suffering. And the reason we do avoid that is because when you do look upstream, what we see is ourselves in a very real way. We see the fact that the rich Western economies are able to accumulate and consume so much is because they've appropriated vast amounts

from the rest of the world in terms of not only resources and ecological capacity, but also emission space, for example. So our footprints have really harmed much of humanity. And that is something that we have to sort of face up to. I'm Della Duncan, and you're listening to an upstream conversation with Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Originally from Swaziland, Jason's research has focused on a critique of development and globalization. He has also written about climate change, basic income, and soil regeneration. His latest book is titled The Divide, a brief guide to global inequality

and its solutions. We spoke with Jason at his office at the London School of Economics. And you'll hear a few popping sounds at the start of the interview because of some technical difficulties, but they clear up a few minutes in. Welcome, Jason Hickel, to Upstream. Thank you. Jason, let's start by, if I can ask you to describe your background and a little bit about how you came to do the work that you do. Right. So I was born and raised in a small country in southern Africa called Swaziland, two American and spent most of my life there up until university, basically, and then was in the States for university and there became interested in anthropology as kind of a way of trying to understand my

experience of cultural difference and economic inequality, I guess. And that took me into sort of the development sector. I found myself completely disappointed in what development was doing. I felt that I kind of missed the point about what was actively causing poverty and underdevelopment and inequality in the first place. Like really kind of missing the point about structural causes. And that drove me back into anthropology to do a PhD. So that's kind of critical global south lens, I guess. And what are some of your insights from your research in South Africa that you've taken with you into the work that you do? Some of the key learnings or insights, maybe?

or insights, maybe? Yeah, so I mean, I devoted quite a number of years of my life to studying politics in South Africa. And I was I was focused, I guess, mostly on a particular group of marginalized migrant workers in rural Zululand, who had this really kind of what appeared to be kind of bizarre political position of rejecting the ANC's, the African National Congress's version of liberal democracy after 1994. And so I was kind of curious to know like what drove this rejection of democracy, because that seemed kind of anti-progressive. And so I spent a few years sort of living with them and trying to understand that perspective. And what I came out with was understanding, I guess, kind of like their position of critique of the ANC and its kind of modernizing projects as one that imposes like a variety of

individualism that they think is very destructive to kind of their broader social world. And so I was compelled by that critique, I guess. It was kind of a critique of the way the liberal state poses as kind of this tolerant multicultural institution, but in the end has a kind of violent homogenizing force trying to force everyone into this kind of what they call a kind of single melting pot of individualism. And they're very against that. And so it was kind of gratifying, I guess, to understand their critique of the way that Western freedom and Western liberation and Western equality works as something that entails, I guess, a presupposition of a certain kind of subjectivity that they find very damaging.

I guess, a presupposition of a certain kind of subjectivity that they find very damaging. So you write a lot about the climate movement. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you see as the kind of the strengths of the movement and some of the weaknesses. So some of the critiques that you have about it. So for me, I think the climate movement has done a really phenomenal job of sort of drawing the world's attention to the emergency that we face. really phenomenal job of sort of drawing the world's attention to the emergency that we face. And by pointing out in sort of in no uncertain terms that we have to get off fossil fuels and as rapidly as possible. And it seems like this has gone from being almost a kind of fringe opinion in the public sphere to one that's almost dominant now. And that, you know, against like the massive disinformation campaigns that the movement has faced is a pretty remarkable feat, I would say. So in that respect, they've done an excellent job. But to me, one of the problems

with their approach has been that the focus on fossil fuels alone, I think, has led us to sort of misunderstand the problem, misperceive solutions. So even if we imagine that we are able to get off of fossil fuels tomorrow, okay, I mean, that would be a brilliant achievement. Of course, it's not going to happen. But even if we were, that still actually wouldn't solve the climate change problem, because fossil fuels only account for about 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, which is, of course, a significant chunk. But the other 30% come from other processes like deforestation, from our landfills, which produce methane, from industrial agriculture, which depletes the soils and causes carbon to rise from soils and destroys carbon sinks, from livestock farming, which is

also another major source of methane, production of cement, production of steel, etc., all cause greenhouse gases and have nothing at all to do with fossil fuels. And the problem is that those emissions are not static. They're growing every year, precisely as a result of the fact that our economic system is programmed effectively to grow by about 3% per year, right? And that sounds like a pretty small increment. But if you think about it, 3% per year is a doubling every 20 years. It's an exponential kind of arrangement. So that means every 20 years, doubling the size of our economy today, just simply so that it can stay afloat. So that's double the extraction, double the consumption, double the production, double the iPods, double the cars, double the airplane miles, etc, etc.

I mean, it's almost absurd when you think about what that requires in terms of pressure on our ecological systems. And so it seems to me like focusing on fossil fuels is great, but it really misses the deeper problem, which is that we're only using fossil fuels in the first place at such crazy rates, simply in order to feed our obsession with GDP growth, with economic growth. So maybe instead of pointing to fossil fuels as the culprit, we need to think more deeply about the basic logic that underlies the global economy, and begin to think, you know, not just in terms of getting off fossil fuels, but also in terms of what would it look like to our culture and starting to think towards possible degrowth solutions for rich countries, which are the primary culprits when it comes to climate change and ecological destruction. Yeah, and to me, that's kind of the direction we need to start pointing in. I mean, I guess in a way, like the climate change movement has accomplished a lot,

but we need to sort of move to sort of phase two and push towards a deeper critique. So can we unpick that a little bit? So we have growth, we have capitalism, we have neoliberalism. What do you see as the relationship there? Is it purely growth that's the problem? Well, I think that there's different dimensions to each of those, I think, that contribute in different ways. So I would say that growth is a key underlying problem, for sure. So I would say that growth is a key underlying problem, for sure. And capitalism requires exponential GDP growth. So without at least 3% GDP growth per year, then we know that major firms cannot make profits in aggregate.

So as soon as you have something below that, our economy is in crisis. So what is wrong with a system that requires exponential growth on a limited planet? And if it doesn't have that, it goes into crisis. We need to rethink that because that's clearly not a feasible model for us, because what we know is that we can't grow indefinitely. And so we're going to need an economic model that does not require growth. So growth in capitalism, I see, is very intricately interrelated. Neoliberalism is, you know, it's a kind of, it's a brand of capitalism that's geared towards kind of radical market freedom, but specifically market freedom in the interests of rich and powerful actors, as opposed to market freedom for everybody, which is what makes neoliberalism distinctive. And I guess the way

that neoliberalism has contributed to this crisis, particularly, is by reducing the state's ability to regulate its markets. And this is a problem now because states lack the capacity to sort of invest heavily in green infrastructure, for example states lack the capacity to sort of invest heavily in green infrastructure, for example, because they've been sort of rolled back by neoliberal doctrine, or they lack the capacity to regulate the fossil fuel industry, for example, because again, their power to regulate private industry has been diminished by neoliberal doctrine. So I think that the neoliberalism has certainly contributed to advancing this crisis in terms of the climates. But ultimately, it can't be to blame in and of itself. There's a

deeper logic at stake that has been around for a longer time that we need to confront, I think. And so what does degrowth, what would degrowth feel like or look like? It's easy to say it as a thing, but what would that actually mean? So when you say degrowth, a lot of people mistakenly assume that that basically means austerity. And on that basis, they reject it as terrible. I mean, it sounds like voluntary poverty, you know, etc, etc. But all it basically means is, is reducing the footprint of our of our economy back down to sustainable levels and to maintain economic throughput at a sustainable kind of steady state. Now, we know that it's possible to do that while actually increasing indicators of human happiness and well-being. So degrowth does not mean sort of

voluntary impoverishment at all. It means actually freeing us up to focus more on the things that actually matter when it comes to human well-being. So we know, for example, that Europe has a significantly smaller GDP per capita than the US, and yet outperforms the US in almost every indicator of social progress, and also has, you know, about 40% less emissions per capita. So that's an amazing example right there. We know that Costa Rica has, you Rica has a GDP per capita something like one-fifth that of the U.S., and yet has life expectancy that exceeds the U.S., has happiness indicators that exceed the U.S.,

has literacy rates that match the U.S., etc., etc. In virtually every category that matters in terms of well-being, we see countries like Costa Rica, for example, performing really, really well with an extremely small economic GDP per capita in comparison to some of the sort of the big consuming countries. So degrowth, you know, just means sort of moving our economies towards more sustainable models, and they already exist in some ways, and we can improve on them. But the point is to aim at sustainability while improving human well-being. And that, to me,

seems to be sort of the challenge of the 21st century when it comes to thinking about development. And in an article that you wrote called A Just Response to Climate Change Violence, you reframe climate change as climate change violence. Can you talk about that reframing and why that's important? Yeah, that's interesting. So I was asked to write an article evaluating how climate change has caused an increase in conflict and violence around the world. And, you know, that's easy enough to do. I mean, we know there's already wars that are being attributed to climate change because it's causing drought and human displacement.

And so more conflict over resources and water, et cetera. and so more conflict over resources and water, etc. Even the conflict in Syria is regarded as being caused in some sort of ultimate sense, at least partially by climate change in the region. But I immediately wanted to think like, okay, so climate change is causing a rise in violence, but what if we turn the tables and think about climate change itself as a form of violence? How does that change the way we think about what's going on here? And there's lots of ways that we can see this manifested, this idea of climate change as violence on a global scale. So we know for a fact that climate change is causing loss of human life

in the region of 400,000 people per year. And 98% of those deaths happen in the global south. And we also know that climate change is costing countries in the region of $700 billion per year, which is six times as much as the aid budget, for example. 83% of that are costs that are incurred in global south countries. So the global south is incurring these costs and losses to human life at a dramatically higher rate than the global north, even though the global south has done, you know, comparably almost nothing to contribute to the climate change disaster. So for example, we know that the global north itself, mainly rich Western countries like the US, Britain, Germany, France, have contributed something like 70% of historical greenhouse gas emissions. And even today, I mean, of course, today, you know, China emits more greenhouse gases than the US. But on a per capita basis, the US still vastly outstrips China when it comes to per capita emissions.

So what's clear to me and clear to many people in Global South is that this is a crisis that has been caused in large part by rich Western nations. And yet the consequences are being felt in a really visceral, violent way in the Global South. So how do we think about this kind of conundrum? Is there a framework that we can draw on to think about responsibility and blame and reparations? And the truth is that there's really not. I mean, if you walk down the street in London and you get mugged, then there's recourse for you.

But if you're the victim of the structural violence of climate change, there's virtually no recourse. And so we have to start thinking about what it would look like for us to have a legal code that would apportion responsibility fairly and allow some kind of reparations for this kind of damage. So you've written that popular progressivism today tends to promote a form of critique that obscures the coercive dimensions of capitalism and offers alternatives that ultimately actually advance its cause. So can you talk about what you mean by this? And also, what are some examples, particularly in this environmental or

green context? So I've always been really fascinated by the way that capitalism has this extraordinary ability to kind of colonize or co-opt its own critique. So there's really clear examples that we see in our everyday lives. Like, for example, once I was in Heathrow Airport and I saw this beautiful pink cardigan that was on sale for close to 200 pounds, and on it was emblazoned the iconic face of Che Guevara, right? And so this elite commodity has commoditized

the very symbol of protest against itself. Or, for example, like all of the hipster clubs and bars that are very popular around London and New York, which appropriate the aesthetic of working class neighborhoods, right? Factories, bare brick, etc, etc. The light bulbs, the hanging Edison bulbs. The bare light bulbs, exactly. But of course, these venues are extremely exclusive and elites. And so again, you have this kind of appropriation, this commodification of the opposites of capitalism, right, somehow, or capitalism's obverse, at least. But then, you know, we also see the emergence of commodities that not only allow you to purchase

a kind of countercultural aesthetic, or identity, but also allow you to purchase your redemption from being a consumer itself, like Tom's shoes, for example, allows you to be a consumer and buy that pair of shoes, and yet at the same time obviate your own status as a consumer by making sure that somebody else in the world gets a pair of shoes, a poor child or something like that. But the same is true of all sorts of different commodities, like ethos water is a good example, or product red, etc. So these are ways that basically capitalism effectively sells us the feeling that we are resisting it.

And so resistance gets co-opted. Instead of being expressed on the street in the form of a kind of revolution or resistance or protest, then it gets co-opted into consumption itself. So it's kind of the recuperative frame that capitalism uses to maintain itself in the face of its own critique. And we also see this when it comes to environmental resistance, for example, like we know that, that the gas guzzling cars are bad. And so Toyota is now is now selling us a Prius, for example. And so you can kind of obviate your sense of being a gas guzzling consumer by, by buying a Prius car. But of course, you know, that doesn't challenge the real logic that's at stake,

the real logic that's producing the problem in the first place. It simply allows you to perpetuate it. A real challenge would be to reduce your consumption, not to consume a different kind of commodity necessarily. And this is something that Naomi Klein, I think, points out brilliantly, that of the three demands of the environmental movement, reduce, reuse, recycle, only reuse and recycle have gained any kind of

traction, and specifically recycling, because it allows a continuation of your consumer patterns without any threat to the status quo. Whereas to reduce consumption is not something that's compatible with capitalism, right? It's not compatible with the imperative for growth. And so that's where the real challenge lies. So that's one thing to always be aware of when we think about the tendency of these new commodities. And that's one thing to always be aware of when we think about the tendency of these new commodities. And that idea of reducing consumption is inherent to the idea of Buddhist economics, the idea of how can you meet your needs with less and less and actually practicing non-attachment of goods. It's interesting. Exactly. I hadn't thought about it in that way.

Right. So, you know, you talked about capitalism there, and I'm wondering to move towards socialism. So although what Marx wrote is relevant today as it ever was, many people may not identify with socialism or Marxism and may not even identify as part of the proletariat or maybe even the working class. So what is your sense of what socialism or an eco-socialism might look like for the 21st century? Yeah, that's a really good question. I found that quite intriguing. So here in Britain, there used to be kind of like a robust working class identity, I suppose. And that really is kind of fracturing these days. There was a really interesting survey done by the BBC,

I believe, recently, a couple years ago, kind of asking people to identify in different class locations. And what you find is that like quite a small proportion of the population identifies as working class, even though they are, in fact, objectively working class. Right. And so I think the state has done a really, really powerful job, really effective job of convincing people that they're not working class. So as to sort of eradicate that identity, which is intrinsically oppositional to capital. And yeah, so we're stuck in a situation where people don't necessarily identify as working class. And so how do you kind of propel a socialist agenda without the idea of the proletariat and without foot soldiers who sort of carry that banner? And maybe some people mourn that, but really I don't.

It seems to me like there's sort of new categories emerging that are interesting, right? Like the idea of the precariat, for example, which basically encompasses not just the working class, but also people who are not workers, which is like a growing proportion of the population, I guess. And people who are sort of precariously employed or employed on zero hour contracts, or homeless, etc. Like it's kind of broader category that can unite people who have been negatively affected by the way our economic system is organized. Another example is the idea of the 99% the Occupy gave to us, which establishes new frontiers, new horizons of antagonism that don't rely on sort of the idea of, you know, capitalists versus workers, but rather the idea

of like a tiny elite who have accumulated the vast majority of the nations or the world's wealth and power versus the rest of us who are kind of subjected to the decisions they make. And so I think there's sort of new frontiers, new forms of identity that we can imagine that might be more effective in organizing. But also, you know, your question is about socialism. And there's been big changes in the idea of socialism, I think. So when I first started teaching in Virginia in 2005 and 2006, then my students were sort of very against the idea of socialism. I mean, the various suggestion of it turned them off. They felt that I was sort of like a radical or Marxist or something like that. And, you know, which I guess is true. But these days, there's much less stigma attached to it. And I'm not really sure what accounts for

that, I guess, kind of the sloughing off of old Cold War fears, I suppose, maybe the fact that the 2008 crisis really cracked open capitalism and made it appear as though it's failing in more obvious ways than before. But at the same time, I wonder if a new language is emerging that allows us to think about alternatives to capitalism without relying on that old category, which still does turn people off in some ways, especially in older generation. Like, for example, Paul Mason's new book called Post-Capitalism or something along those lines. This idea of post-capitalism to me is very compelling, because it doesn't suggest like the agenda is necessarily to kind of revert to the past

and smash capitalism, but rather to evolve past capitalism into something more interesting, more new, more advanced even. And I think that's more compelling to people, especially to a younger generation, than the idea of socialism, which still kind of has a kind of stodgy feel to it somehow, right? So even if we sort of do believe in the values of socialism, I think that new forms of framing it can be more effective in terms of communicating. Even the idea of Buddhist

economics, for example. I mean, to me, that sounds fresh and new, whereas socialism sounds maybe old. And maybe that's more compelling framing to use for people. And even what comes to mind is the solidarity economy, because that is kind of workplace socialism. So worker-owned cooperatives is really coming fresh again, but it's rebranded as solidarity economy instead of socialism. has co-opted that language, that terminology for its own ends, right? So something that was meant to sort of be an explicit alternative to capitalism now presents to us in the form of Airbnb and Uber, which are some of the most rapacious forms of capital accumulation. So yeah, exactly. Let's switch to the topic of development. I'm wondering if you can talk us through your understanding of the history of the international development narrative and

kind of where it is now. So one of my problems with the development narrative as it comes to us today is the fact that it's so heavily reliant on the idea of aid and charity, which rich countries give to poor countries. And the idea is that rich countries became wealthy because of their own hard work and because of their own like superior cultural values and their own, you know, correct economic policies, whereas poor countries failed at all of that. They had backwards values and the wrong policies, et cetera. And that's why they're poor. And so rich countries having achieved the heights of development, then reach across that chasm, which they had no role in creating and give charity to poor countries to kind of help them up the ladder. And I just think that framing,

you know, that's a very dominant framing. We see it, we see it coming from Bono, we see it coming from Bill Gates, from the MDGs, from the new sustainable development goals, from virtually every like mainstream developments institution, this narrative of aid and charity is dominance, right? And to me, that really, that really obscures what's really happening in the global economy, and in the history of international relations when it comes to why rich countries are rich and poor countries are poor. So if you dig into the history, then what becomes apparent is that rich countries became rich

precisely in the process of rendering poor countries poor, of making poor countries poor, through basically relations of extraction. So the most obvious, of course, is colonialism. So we know that colonialism was really instrumental in providing the resources and labor power necessary to kind of spur the Industrial Revolution and create the riches that Europe was able to accumulate. And also just the direct plunder of Latin America and Africa and India, which systematically basically destroyed

indigenous economies and ruined people's livelihoods and their ability to achieve well-being, etc. So effectively, like, D developed large portions of the world. And that's very clearly documented in historical texts and economic history. But then you had this really interesting period in the 1960s and 70s, when global South countries were liberated from colonialism. And they started pursuing their own kind of sovereign development, I guess you might say, where they were able to determine their own tariff policies, determine their own rules for wages and corporate regulations, etc, etc. And it was kind of like a Keynesian mixed economy model for

development. And it was really successful. So at the time, Global South countries were achieving rates of GDP growth of like 3.2% for 20 years. And I've already said that GDP growth is problematic, but some growth clearly is necessary, probably, in some contexts. And so what we did see is that incomes did increase dramatically. If you want to measure well-being by income, the 60s and 70s in the global south were excellent for that, basically. But the big problem was that in the process of establishing their own sovereign developments, they basically pissed off rich countries like the US and Britain, specifically, and France, because effectively, these richer countries were losing their access to the cheap labor and the open markets that they had secured under colonialism.

And so in order to reclaim those markets and access to cheap resources and so on, they, in many cases, intervened through covert military action to depose Global South leaders who were rolling out these progressive policies. So, you know, the coup in Iran in 1953, the coup in Guatemala in 1954, the assassination of Salvador Allende in 1973. I mean, really dozens of sort of these US and British backed coups that deposed progressive leaders and in many cases installed dictators who were more friendly to Western interests. So really, like, this process really kind of threw a wrench in the process of Global South sovereignty, really. And also forms of South-South solidarity

were destroyed by this process of like ruining the progressive movements in the Global South. And then, of course, in the 1980s, all of this was compounded by structural adjustment programs, which were imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on global South countries, which completely devastated their economies. I mean, just slashed per capita income growth really dramatically, caused a dramatic rise in poverty across the global South, etc. So, yeah, so to me, I mean, the stories go on, really. I mean, you can trace the same story out across the generations. And what you see is that history demonstrates that rich countries have been perpetually damaging poor countries and causing their underdevelopment, plundering them, extracting from them. And now suddenly the discourse that we're handed back

is that rich countries are benevolently giving aid to the poor. It doesn't make any sense at all. So I think that we really have to puncture that illusion that rich countries are benevolent givers of aid when in fact they've been historically takers. And that continues today. When you look upstream, and the issues that you've been talking about with development and with climate change and politics today, what do you see as kind of the upstream, the root? Yeah, yeah, I guess for me, the problem with the aid discourse is that it imagines the upstream away, right? And this is exactly what the metaphor of upstream focuses on. You know, so we see all these hungry and dying people, for example, and we feel compelled to reach out out of our charity and try to help them. But we completely avoid any consideration, any intellectual engagements with the upstream causes of their suffering. with the upstream causes of their suffering. And the reason we do avoid that is because when you do look upstream,

what we see is ourselves in a very real way. We see the fact that the rich Western economies are able to accumulate and consume so much because they've appropriated vast amounts from the rest of the world in terms of not only resources and ecological capacity, but also a mission space, for example. So our footprints have really harmed much of humanity. And that is something that we have to sort of face up to. But in a very real way, I think that trying to focus down on the structural causes that ultimately drive poverty

and inequality and climate change is essential. And, you know, for climate change, you know, clearly it's our, you know, radically unhealthy obsession with GDP growth and the way that's written into our economy. For poverty and inequality, it has to do with the way that the rules of the global economy are rigged to facilitate the flow of wealth from the periphery of the global economy to the core, through the complete lack of democracy in global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and the WTO, which are controlled largely by a small handful of rich countries, and through the fact that climate change is being perpetuated by overconsumption in rich countries and having a poverty-inducing, a poverty-causing effect in the global south. I mean, to me, these are all the ultimate causes that we need to be addressing. And, you know, tinkering around with fossil fuels and aid, it just doesn't cut it. It's not going to

stave off the crisis at hand. And we'll be doing it for the rest of our lives. And we don't want to be doing that. We want to be able to target the ultimate causes and see real change happen. Well, thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for this conversation, Jason. Thanks very much for having me. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with anthropologist Jason Hickel. For more from Upstream, visit us at upstreampodcast.org or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Upstream Podcast.