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

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

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. 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 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 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 de-growth 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 occupation of colonial territory, a direct appropriation of the resources, et cetera, et cetera. But beneath the veneer of what seems like a fair exchange is continued appropriation. Can you touch on why the prices of labor are lower in the global south? And maybe if it's related, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about that history of maybe not like direct

colonization, because most folks are probably familiar with that process to some extent. But I'm really interested to know if it has something to do with the active de-development or underdevelopment that occurred with the same dynamic between the imperialist core and the periphery. Like Walter Rodney talks a lot about how the Global South was actively de-developed. And I'm wondering if that is sort of a legacy, if it's currently happening or if it's a legacy or both that is impacting the current dynamic that we're seeing. Yeah, no, I mean, 100% that's true. Like, like if you think about kind of the core definition of imperialism, it's basically a process by which the core economies organized the production systems of the periphery around servicing, consumption, and accumulation in the core. And this is the pattern that persisted in every colonial encounter. They would enter,

they would realize, oh, this land and this labor is being used for local subsistence. Well, we can't have that. We need to reorganize it around working on colonial plantations or in colonial mines, producing things that were going to then ship to the Metropole, et cetera, et cetera. And so the economies of the periphery were kind of de-industrialized and then reorganized around this kind of export oriented approach, right? And of course, the terms of trade were like, just obviously unfair. Like the colonizers were literally setting the prices or even there weren't even prices at all. In some cases, it was just direct appropriation through production of things done with enslaved labor and so on. Right. And then of course, like a key feature of this also was just the mass dispossession

of people from the means of production, which led to persistently high unemployment rates, which remain really prominent across the global south, which maintain downward pressure on wages, et cetera, et cetera. So this is one of the main reasons why labor is super cheap in the global south. But also more recently, we know that these price inequalities are a direct result of modern imperialist interventions. For example, when the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs across the global south in the 80s and 90s and continuing today, these programs were intended to directly reduce the cost of southern labor and resources. They purposely gutted labor laws, they slashed environmental regulations, they cut public sector employments, etc., etc. All of this basically making it easier for Western capital to access and use cheap labor and resources in the global South.

We can see actually empirically, direct empirical correlation between the imposition of structural lesson programs and price differentials increasing in the 1980s and 1990s as a result. And that's a direct cause of an increase in value transfers that we saw during that period. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the place that this unequal exchange theory has in the modern left because it's not a universally accepted theory. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about why some on the left reject the idea of unequal exchange outright or the idea of value transfers and sort of how you would respond to this. Yeah, this is interesting to me. I mean, I've encountered these arguments several times,

and the truth is I find them really unconvincing, like the argument that unequal exchange is not a thing. It seems to me that the basic claim that they're making is that the trade is fair because the prices that are involved in international trade are somehow correct or neutral. And I've got to say, I find it very bizarre that Marxists or leftists will ever try to claim that prices are a neutral phenomenon. I mean, again, like I explained earlier, we know for a fact that in our own national economies, that's not the case. We know for a fact that if a right-wing government comes to power and destroys unions and guts labor laws, then wages will go down and profits will go up. So wages, which are the prices of labor, are an artifact of power imbalances. And similarly

with resources, if you've got environmental regulations and resources are cheaper, waste is cheaper, et cetera, et cetera. And capital, I mean, capital gravitates towards doing these things. And it does these things on an international scale in the same way that does them on a national scale. And again, like the colonial intervention and structural adjustment programs, etc. are examples of how that occurs. So look, I mean if you can understand how a company can appropriate surplus value from workers, then you can understand how the core can appropriate surplus value from the periphery. If you can see that workers in a company consume less than they produce, because a lot of it's being appropriated for profits and surplus,

and if you can see that bosses consume more than they produce, then lot of it's being appropriated for profits and surplus. And if you can see that bosses consume more than they produce, then you can understand unequal exchange. It's not difficult to sort of basic Marxist principles, but kind of applied to the world scale. So, but to your question about like why Western Marxists kind of feel uneasy about it, I mean, I think it's largely because like, it seems as though an equal exchange theorists are saying that the Western working class somehow benefits from imperialism. And I think this feels uncomfortable to Western Marxists, right, who want to understand workers as always being exploited. So the idea that like they're benefiting from imperialism does not sit well with this broader theory.

Now in some sense, it's very obviously true. The level of material consumption that even ordinary people enjoy in the core is clearly due to a mass appropriation of resources from the global south, right? And clearly the cheapening also of those resources. But the key fact, I think, and I think this is true to what Samir and me and Etc. were saying, was that it's not really workers who benefit from imperialism, it's capital. And I mean this in a very profound sense, right? If you think about like the history of the 20th century in the core economies, the capitalist class came under very heavy pressure from socialist

movements and labor movements, right, especially in the middle of the 20th century. And the capitalist class responded by basically trying to crush these movements violently wherever possible, but also by giving relatively considerable concessions in the form of things like public services and more decent wages, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing is that capitalism requires cheap labor. And these concessions to the working classes would have been enough to cause a real crisis of capital accumulation in the core, except that the capitalist class in the core was able to maintain capital accumulation by using cheap labor in the periphery. So imperialism and unequal exchange specifically basically rescued capitalism from socialist

pressure. Okay. So I'm not saying here that public services and decent wages require imperialism. Clearly they do not. What I'm saying is that capital accumulation requires imperialism. It's fully possible for us to have universal public services at a high quality and decent wages, et cetera, et cetera, without imperialism. But it requires transitioning to a post-capitalist economy. And I think that's the key thing here, right? And I think that Marxists in the West

should be able to appreciate this fact. Like once you recognize like the key dynamics of capitalism that are operating here, it should seem less troubling to you. Just as a quick aside, one thing about the saber rattling towards China that we're seeing quite a bit in the US right now, the part of it that strikes me is just so absurd is that a lot of the rhetoric around

that that China is leading the global economy or at least is at, quote, risk of leading the global economy in the coming years and how that frightens US politicians. The whole reason that that's the case in the first place is because of that process that you were mentioning of like capital flight to the periphery in many ways. So it makes it sound so much more absurd when you know a little bit about the history and the hypocrisy that goes into all of that. I mean, basically, if you think about like the history of kind of contemporary geopolitical tensions, discourse, etc. in the West, I mean, basically, like basically, Western economies get pissed off whenever real development occurs in the global South. And the reason is basically because real development in

the South means that people in the global South are now consuming what they produce, and they're consuming a greater share of the planet's resources, a fairer share of planet's resources. But what that effectively means is that less is available from the total global products for consumption of the core, which manifests in some cases as inflation. If the prices of labor and production go up in the global south because there's more demand on their production from the domestic economy, then that means that the supply price for the north increases and this leads to inflationary pressures and it becomes very difficult for capital to accumulate profits under these kinds of conditions.

And so there's incredible pressure for capitalists to then try to re-cheapen labor in the global South, which is exactly what you see every time you get a Western invasion of a country like Libya or Venezuela or the saber rattling against China. The imperative here is you have to prevent them from having any kind of real sovereign control over their productive capacities Ultimately, right because sovereign control over productive capacity in the global south is a fundamental threat to capital accumulation on a world scale Fundamental it literally cannot continue to exist under those conditions Yeah

Yeah and I appreciate you using the the term sort of real development in the global south because we know from Walter Rodney's work, especially that underdevelopment is also a form of development in a sense, right? I want to look at the findings from your paper because your arguments aren't just sort of like purely vibe based, right? Like you do a lot of deep research on this stuff.

And I think it's really important to emphasize that. And yeah, maybe if you could talk a little bit about the paper that I mentioned at the top, the one from global environmental change. And yeah, maybe just start with some of your findings. I think one of the most important and interesting ones is sort of, you know, what we've been discussing that growth in the rich countries relies on a massive net appropriation of labor and resources from the global south. And so we've talked about that a bit. Can you unpack that and talk about the research that supports that claim?

Yeah, totally. So let me back up and start by saying this, right? Like the earlier theorists like Samir Amin were only able to give kind of rough estimates of value transfer because they didn't have very good data, right? They had monetary trade data, but they didn't have any physical trade data. But today, that's no longer a problem. We have these very powerful databases called environmentally extended multi-regional input output models that allow us to basically trace physical flows of embodied labor and resources all around the world between all different countries. It gives you an incredible view of the world economy. 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 confirming some of the other means work, it net transfers truly massive quantities of value to the global north. So we looked at this in four categories. I'm just gonna briefly tell you the results of that, right? 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 healthcare, education, housing, water, electricity, heating, cooling, induction stoves,

refrigerators, public transit, computers, mobile phones, et cetera, et cetera, 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. And just to clarify, this is the difference after the sort of disproportionate transfers, the uneven transfers. Exactly. This is the net flow. So that's accounting for what the south receives disproportionate transfers, the uneven transfers. Exactly, this is the net flow. So that's accounting for what the South receives

from the North, right? This is a net outward transfer. So we found that for energy and materials, and then for land, we found a net flow of 820 million hectares of embodied land, which is roughly twice the size of India, which is a quantity of land that could be used to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on diet type. But instead, that land

is used to produce things like sugar for Coca-Cola and beef for McDonald's, etc., etc., consumed in the global north. And then the final one we looked at was labor, and we found a net flow of 826 billion hours of embodied labor from south to north each year. To put that in perspective, that is more than the total annual labor rendered by the entire workforces of the US and the European Union combined. I mean, we're talking about armies of labor, which could be used to staff hospitals and schools in the global south or to produce food and goods for local needs, but instead is mobilized to kind of churn out this net flow of tech gadgets and fast fashion for Northern corporations. And I should say briefly, this last figure, this labor figure, comes from a new paper that we have coming out soon with my students, Morena Hanbury-Lemos,

and also Felix Barber. And one of the other things we did in that paper was we calculated that if this total quantity of net appropriated labor was paid at the prevailing northern wages according to skill level, then it would be worth 16.9 trillion euros, which is a massive quantity of labor value, which gives us a sense for the scale of value appropriation that's going on here. Wow. That is just staggering. It is, actually.

It's very disturbing. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to even really comprehend that, you know, like wrap my head around those numbers. And I think, again, it just further underscores how the North is like actively de-developing the South, right? Like how that's actually a form of development in and of itself under development. And it's even more outrageous when you think about how those resources and labor hours are being sucked just directly into the coffers of capital.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so look, I think that this is important because basically it helps us understand a few things about the world economy, right? Like the main thing is it helps us understand the persistence of mass poverty and underdevelopment. The global South is impoverished not because it's somehow naturally poor or somehow behind on the ladder of development, because its considerable productive capacities are misdirected and drained to support developments in the core and egregious consumption, mostly elite consumption, mostly capital accumulation in the core. And by the way, it's important to note that this drain massively outstrips any aid that the South receives. So in the earlier paper, we calculated that for every

dollar of aid the South receives, they lose at least $30 in drain through unequal exchange. So this myth, right, that the rich countries are kind of benevolently giving aid to help the poor countries develop and blah, blah, is a PR narrative really, that effectively obscures the fact that value flows the other way, that poor countries are being exploited to develop rich countries. But I think it also, like it's also important because it reveals that the high levels of consumption and economic growth in the core rely utterly on net appropriation from the Global South. So just to give you an example, in the case of materials and labor, we found that around

half of everything that is consumed in the core is net appropriated from the global south through an equal exchange. Now think about what this means. This is a huge figure. It means that in the absence of imperialism, in the absence of appropriation through imperialism, the core would have to reduce their consumption by 50%. Or if they wanted to maintain their existing levels of consumption, then they would have to reduce their consumption by 50%. Or if they wanted to maintain their existing levels of consumption, then they would have to double their labor and material extraction,

which would clearly not be possible because it would cause social resistance and political backlash and also massive ecological damage that you'd have to contend with. In other words, the high levels of consumption that characterize the global North today are literally only possible because of appropriation from the global South. Now think about it, in the absence of this appropriation, then you'd be forced as a society to think, okay, if we have to consume a lot less labor and resources from the global South, then how are we going to organize our society such that we meet human needs at a good standard? And your solution is going to be clearly to scale down less necessary forms of

consumption and production, right? Maybe we do a lot less fast fashion and private jets and focus our resources instead on what's necessary for human well-being. So that's another, I think, important implication of this. But then the final thing is also that this data on unequal exchange reveals that while the North benefits from this extra consumption from the world economy, the social and ecological costs of that production of that consumption are effectively externalized to the global South. That's where the damage happens. So you don't see it primarily in England or in Finland.

It's happening in the Congo. It's happening in Indonesia, it's happening in Brazil at the frontiers of extractivism in the capitalist economy, right? And so this is effectively the core dynamic of environmental injustice. Right. And this is why degrowth is necessary, not only to introduce some modicum of justice, right, but also to avert ecological breakdown. I believe it's from another paper that you published, but you write that rich countries are responsible for 74% of global excess resource use over the period from 1970 to 2017. And you explicitly state that in order to stop the ecological crisis, the rich

countries will have to begin pursuing transformative post-growth and degrowth policies. And yeah, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what those might look like. Yeah, so I mean, that paper basically illustrates a core principle of ecological economics, which is that the ecological crisis is being overwhelmingly driven by rich countries. All of the discourse that you hear out there like, oh, it's being caused by whatever, China and India and blah, blah. I mean, this is just simply not true. It's overwhelmingly the rich countries and of the rich countries, overwhelmingly the USA and the EU. And that's true for resource extraction, which is what we covered in that paper, but also true for emissions. In another paper, we found that the core economies are responsible for about 90% of the excess

emissions that are driving climate breakdown. So yeah, look, I mean, when you understand this facts, then it becomes clear that rich countries are going to have to reduce their material use to more sustainable levels. And the question is, how do you achieve that? Well, the first answer people want to give is through efficiency improvements, which is great. Like, I'm a huge fan of technology. I'm a huge fan of efficiency improvements.

I think that we need more investment in that kind of stuff. But at the same time, we also know empirically that it's not going to be enough on its own to achieve the sort of necessary reductions, right? What's going to be required is that rich countries shift to a post-growth economic system and then actively scale down less necessary forms of production, right? So, I mean, think about it.

Like in the middle of an ecological emergency, do we really want to be devoting energy and materials to producing mansions and private jets and whatever, industrial beef and fast fashion and weapons, et cetera, et cetera. There's huge chunks of our economy. They're massively energy intensive and material intensive and contribute little, if anything, to human wellbeing. And in any sane democratic economy, we would very quickly scale those down. And that's basically the, I mean, that's the crux of post growth and degree of thought. And we can talk later about what the policy likes, what some of the social policies would be like for sustaining such a transition if you want to.

Yeah, yeah. Let's, let's talk about that as, as we go through here. But just sticking a little bit to some of the conclusions that you found in some of the related papers that you've published over the months and the years. I'm wondering if you can tackle this question that you hear quite often that capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty. And in one of your papers, you describe how, in fact, empirically, that is not true. I'm wondering if you can respond to this argument that capitalism lifted millions out of poverty, and maybe discuss a little bit from the

findings that you've discovered that that's not the case. Yeah, okay. So yeah, I was really curious about this narrative because a couple of years ago, it basically became kind of this meme, basically, primarily from this book published by Steven Pinker where he used a graph showing really rapid decline in extreme poverty from 1820 until today. And his argument was that this was caused by capitalism. So I was curious about this because this kind of conflicts with at least a century of Marxist scholarship. And a lot of your own research. AO Yeah. And so we dug into this and I'm not going to bore you with the details of what's going on with that graph. That graph basically doesn't actually measure poverty at all because the household surveys that we actually require to really measure extreme poverty don't exist prior

to about 1980, right? So what they're actually measuring in this graph is basically total output, but this does not tell us at all whether people have actual access to the basic subsistence goods that they need to not be in extreme poverty, right? Like food, shelter, clothing, et cetera. So to assess this question,

we actually have to have evidence on actual welfare standards. So what we did, and this is research with a student of mine called Dylan Sullivan, we tested this claim about capitalism and extreme poverty against historical evidence going back to the rise of capitalism in the 16th century. And what we found was that the rise of capitalism was actually associated with a substantial decline in real wages to below the levels of subsistence, along with a deterioration in human stature and an increase in premature mortality.

So according to all the historical data on human welfare standards, it looks like the rise of capitalism made things worse. Now this is not surprising when you think about it, because in Europe, the rise of capitalism, as we know, involved enclosure and mass dispossession of the peasantry, etc., etc. And in the rest of the world, obviously, capitalism was imposed through European colonization, like the integration of the periphery was achieved through this extraordinary violence, which involved massive social dislocation, destruction of subsistence economies, huge appropriation of resources, genocides, mass enslavement, etc. So it's really not surprising that we see this kind

of dislocation represented in the welfare indicators. But then what happens is that something changes in the late 19th century. It's finally in the late 19th century that we see real progress on social indicators begin to occur in Western Europe, which is 400 years after the rise of capitalism. This is 400 years in the capitalist history. And it coincides directly with the rise of labor movements across Western Europe and socialist movements, which were demanding things like public services and decent wages, et cetera, et cetera. In the periphery, progress on social indicators did

not begin to occur until the early to mid 20th century, right, with the rise of the anti-colonial movements. So what's going on here is that it's clearly not capitalism as such that delivers social progress, rather it's social movements that fought to organize production more around human well-being, right? And this is like, this is not rocket science. Like what matters is not the total output. What matters is what you're producing and who has access to necessary goods and services. And under capitalism,

you're mostly producing for elite accumulation. And, you know, when you have socialist movements checking that tendency, then you're organizing production more around what's necessary for human wellbeing. And that had a dramatic and positive impact on social indicators. And so that's the story, which I think is actually much more interesting than the ridiculous kind of Pinker claim that everything good in the world is due to capitalism, which you

just know is clearly absurd. CB. Another thing that I wanted to ask you about too is I'm curious what you think of, again, some of the folks on the left who are skeptical of or outright reject degrowth as a principle or a set of policy demands that we should carry with us on the left. They've suggested that degrowth is a politics of less and have suggested too that it can be politically poisonous, that it could never gain traction or support among workers in the West and that it should be abandoned.

And I'm curious like what you think of those claims and just sort of the, yeah, in your experience as someone who really has written about and advocated for degrowth quite a bit, I'm wondering if you've experienced that sort of, you know, do folks reject this idea of degrowth? Does it need to be like, I hate to use this term, but like rebranded? Or do you feel like it's working just fine and maybe people just need to have a bit more of a nuanced understanding of what degrowth is. Like it doesn't necessarily mean less of the things in life that make life rich, but less of some of the things in life that we don't really need and that actually end up making us feel like shit anyways. Too much too much importance on them.

Okay. Yeah. Let me try to deal with this. I think this is super important and needs to be talked about more. So I think the first key here is to recognize, first of all, that I think there's something to this claim, right? It's not totally unfounded. However, it's also incorrect. So let's think about why it's not unfounded, because people are suffering. Huge amounts of people, including in the imperial core, struggle to make ends meet, live in extreme economic precarity, face real poverty, etc. And so the key here is that we have to recognize that we don't

just face an ecological crisis. There are some tendencies and degrowth, I think, which are a minority for sure, that see this primarily as an ecological crisis and care a little bit less about the social dimensions of our crisis. But the social crisis is critical to this analysis. In the West, we have extremely high levels of aggregate production and extremely high levels of energy and resource use, like way in excess of sustainable levels. And yet we still fail to meet many basic human needs. In the US, this is particularly egregious. 50% of people in the US cannot afford

adequate healthcare. 25% live in substandard housing, right? In Britain, you have millions of children who live in poverty. In Europe, more broadly, around 90 million people live in conditions of economic insecurity. I mean, this is huge amounts of suffering in the richest countries in the world. And so for people like this, or for anyone who understands this crisis, then degrowth would surely sound like a problem. But here's the thing. We have to understand why this is happening. Like, why does this paradox occur?

Why does it occur that we have extremely high levels of production and resource use and mass social suffering? And the reason is because of capitalism, right? Why does it occur that we have extremely high levels of production and resource use and mass social suffering? And the reason is because of capitalism, right? Capital controls our productive capacities, right? Our labor and our resources. It determines how these will be mobilized and it chooses to mobilize them around what is profitable to capital. So we get massive production of SUVs and mansions and fast fashion, but critical shortages of things like public health care and public transit and renewable energy and affordable housing and other things that we know are obviously necessary.

And the reason is because these are not as profitable or not profitable at all. So the solution to this paradox is that we need to achieve democratic control over our productive capacities and organize production around what is necessary for human wellbeing and ecology. And that will clearly involve increasing certain necessary forms of production that clearly there's deficits of right now, but will also clearly involve radically reducing

destructive and unnecessary forms of production, such as forms of production that only exists to service elite accumulation, etc. So it's actually not so hard to understand. When degrowthers talk about degrowth, they're not talking about degrowing every sector of production. They're talking about degrowing specific sectors of production and focusing our productive capacities around what is actually necessary for human well-being. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing is that I also agree that the degrowth term has lightness and dark to it, right? It's a complicated term. The people

who coined the term found it useful because it fundamentally challenges some of our deep assumptions about how the economy should work. And that challenge forces introspection and analysis and reassessment, et cetera. And I think that's super important to any analytical process. And so this is a term that we need in science, we need in academia, and we need on the left in order for us to have serious analytical conversations about what we have to achieve. At the same time, that's not to say that it should necessarily be used as like a public facing political slogan. Right? Like I don't recommend that political parties use this term.

I don't think it's necessary. What's necessary is the analysis and the necessary policies. So, and when it comes to the general analysis and the policies, there's broad popular support. Surveys and polls show broad support for the idea that we should reorganize our economy around human well-being rather than growth, and that we should implement core degrowth policies, which we can talk about later, like universal public services, public job guarantee, etc., etc., which are central to ecological economics literature, also have broad widespread support. And so this is really not a problem of can these ideas gain traction? We know that they can. I think really the problem here is simply that it needs to be

part of a broader analysis of post-capitalist transition. Now, let me finish this little bit by pointing out that here in Spain, where I live, the Communist Party has endorsed degrowth. They've endorsed degrowth principles as part of their broader Communist Party platform. And I was recently invited to Valencia to a conference that was put on by the Communist Party and the major trade unions. And the purpose of the conference was to discuss the question of degrowth. How do we understand this? How should we integrate it? Like, what should our narrative be? What should the policies be? Et cetera, et cetera. They invited me to come and speak about it. And what I found is that they didn't require any convincing. They're already on board. Like, like for them, the question is not,

is this a correct analysis? The question is, how do we build, you know, narratives and political movements around this? Like, how do we integrate it into our assessments of the economy and into communist visions for the future? And so the Western leftists, specifically, I must say, in the USA, who keep saying, real socialists and trade unions and workers will never be on board, I'm just like, this is just not true. Communist parties in Europe are actively engaging with these questions because communist parties do analysis and communist parties do analysis

and communist parties are rooted in scientific rigor, right? And so it's not good enough to have just fairy tale assumptions about how technology is going to save us if these are not empirically supported. And the real strength of degrowth research is that it's empirically very robust. And so it's not surprising that socialists would gravitate towards it. And furthermore, any socialism worth its salt must have an anti-imperialist politics. And if you recognize that growth in the core is fundamentally dependence on appropriation from the global South, you know, then it's clear that some kind of transformation of the situation is necessary, that some kind of degrowth is going to be necessary, and you need to start thinking about what that looks like.

And so it's not at all surprising to me that socialists and trade unions are thinking about these issues. It's surprising to me that certain figures in the intellectual left are making a career out of trying to say that it's a ridiculous thing to even consider. So I think that we have to have a more honest conversation about this. So I want to ask you about some of the policy stage that we're in, how we might go about bringing that degrowth transition. As you've mentioned, it's clear that a majority of people support degrowth policies.

If not explicitly, they support or are at least sympathetic to what those policies would entail. So yeah, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how we go about doing all of this. How do we actually get to the place where we can practice democratic control over the decisions that shape our lives? Yeah. So, okay, let me start by just briefly describing some of the core policies

that degrowth proposes. And then we'll talk more about the transition that you're talking about here, which is really where the rubber meets the road. So the core policies are basically, first, universal public services, right? The idea here is that let us mobilize our productive capacities around producing what we know to be necessary for human wellbeing. And that includes universal access to healthcare, education, housing, clean energy, clean water, nutritious food, child care, recreational facilities, all the things that are necessary for survival and for decent living should be decommodified and produced in sufficient quantities that they are always readily available. This alone basically establishes a post-growth economy because what it means is

that your economy is no longer dependent on aggregate increases in production in order to remain stable, in order to meet human needs. You're always producing enough for people to live good lives. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is a public job guarantee. And these are really very closely linked. One of the main things that people are afraid of

when it comes to degrowth is, okay, if you're gonna scale down production of whatever whatever SUVs, for example, right? You can tell I hate SUVs. I literally despise them. But okay, if we're going to scale on production of SUVs, what about all the job losses? Right? Et cetera, et cetera. And this is obviously a concern. Obviously you must address it.

And the solution is very simple, which is you establish a public job guarantee that allows anyone from the sunset industries or anyone in any industry to train and participate in socially and ecologically necessary forms of production with living wages. Right. So that's going to be expanding public services, you know, public transits, renewable energy, insulating buildings, restoring ecosystems, whatever it's going to be. Right? With this policy, we remobilize labor around social and ecological necessary production, and also at the same time permanently end unemployment so that economic insecurity is abolished. Nobody needs to worry about this ever again. Economic insecurity and unemployment are artificial scarcities in capital society, and they can

be immediately abolished and we should do that. So this effectively stabilizes the economy, it ensures decent lives for everybody while you scale down less necessary forms of production, right? You're reorganizing the economy. And a key part of this is also economic democracy. So if we've decommodified the core social sector, right, outside of the core social sector, outside of the core social sector, you can still have private firms, let's say, provisioning things like other kinds of goods, right? Whatever, like beer and watches and computers, let's say, like whatever. But the crucial thing is that those firms should be post-capitalist firms. Those markets should

be post-capitalist markets. And what that means is, I mean, the key feature here is that they should be democratically owned and run, right? Where workers and communities are deciding what should be the objective of production and who should benefit from it. Because we know that under conditions of direct democracy, people actively organize production around well-being and ecology rather than around private accumulation. So democracy is the key antidote to capitalism. Economic democracy is the key antidote to capitalism. So these are the key principles here. Now, so this is utopian. This is obviously an eco-socialist scenario.

This must be our horizon. The question becomes, how do we achieve that? And look, I think we need to be real. We need to start building eco-socialist political movements that can achieve political power or otherwise force incumbents to change course. Right? And we have to get busy with that movement building now. And this should be effectively like a party form that can effectively mobilize all of

the anger in the streets, right? Like all of the anger that comes from the climate movements, all of the discontent that comes from labor movements, all of the pure mobilization power that comes from the anti-racist movement and the anti-genocide movement, etc., etc., needs to be able to find a home in an organized political structure that is capable of foundationally transforming our economy to a post-capitalist disposition. And look, I think we have to face up, like specifically environmentalists, have to face up to the fact that we will not solve the climate crisis under capitalism. It's not possible. It's not possible.

And the reason it's not possible is twofold. The first is because the forms of production we know to be necessary to solving the climate crisis, like dramatic increase in, say, renewable energy, public transit, building insulation, land regeneration, capital does not make those investments in the sufficient quantities because they are not profitable to capitalism. Simple as that. And so even though we have the productive capacity to do this, to solve this problem,

we cannot do it as long as capital is in charge of mobilizing our productive capacities. We are hostage to them. And we have to face up to that fact because we don't have, like the longer we sort of ignore this reality, then the deeper and deeper we get into crisis. And we might as well just face up to it now. The second reason that capitalism, that we cannot solve this problem in capitalism is because of its growth dependency. Any reduction in aggregate output in a capitalist economy is absolutely catastrophic for social well-being. Unemployment, people lose their houses and jobs, people who run the streets.

It's catastrophic. And so you have to have an economy that can be stable in the absence of perpetual expansion. And that is precisely what an eco-socialist economy allows you to do, for the reasons I described, right? And until you can arrest the dependence on perpetual growth in the core economies, you have no hope of decarbonizing fast enough to meet the Paris objectives. Just no hope. Of course, you can achieve absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions, even in consumption-based terms. But the key is you cannot do it fast enough for rich countries to decarbonize in a way that's

consistent with their obligations under the Paris Agreement and fairer shares of the carbon budget. It just can't be done. Like, it's going to require a reduction in total energy use to achieve faster decarbonization, and that is going to require a reduction in certain forms of production. And if you have an economy that cannot sustain that, then you're not going to do it, and you're going to fail. So the environmentalist movement has to be serious about this. We have to start openly talking about a necessary post-capitalist transition

if we really care about solving this problem. And that's the situation we're in. And we have to build the political forces necessary to achieve that. Absolutely. And I think just to close out, I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about the importance of internationalism when we talk about sort of this question of what is to be done and how we can bring

about an eco-socialist future. What role does internationalism have to do with what we're talking about? Ecological transition has to happen around the world. I mean, it's most urgent in the core, but of course every economy in the world has to achieve this. Now, for the global South, as we've learned,

they face a fundamental hurdle, which is they do not have sufficient sovereign control over their own productive capacities, over their own land and resources and labor. It's overwhelmingly controlled by international capital. So it's actually impossible for global South countries to achieve an ecological transition under these conditions. What is required is decolonization, economic decolonization, which requires national liberation

struggle against contemporary imperialism. The Global South has to be able to reclaim control over its own productive capacities so that it can make the necessary interventions, so that it can decarbonize its economy and regenerate land and organize production around human needs rather than around servicing the core, right? These problems just don't solve themselves magically, right? It's going to require a political struggle against imperialism. And this continues the long struggle of the people of the global south against colonial domination, which remains the key struggle in the people of the Global South against colonial domination, which remains the key struggle in the world economy today. So at the same time that

we have to achieve post-capitalist transition in the core, in the Global South what is necessary is national liberation and economic solitude. You've been listening to an Upstream Patreon episode with Jason Hickel, professor at 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. As well as the two papers we focused 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, as well as Unequal

Exchange of Labor in the World Economy, forthcoming in the journal Nature Communications. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode and to find our past conversations with Jason. Thank you to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. 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 provide most of our content for free so we can continue to provide political education media for the public

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