Upstream - [UNLOCKED] Palestine Pt. 17: Capital Accumulation at Any Cost w/ Jason Hickel

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

This is an unlocked version of the episode "Palestine Pt. 17: Capital Accumulation at Any Cost w/ Jason Hickel."  You can help to support our work and access Patreon-only episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast In this episode, part 17 of our ongoing series on Palestine, we're joined again by Jason Hickel for a conversation on Palestine and the role that Palestinian liberation plays in the global fight against imperialism and capitalism. The conversation opens with a discussion on why Palestinian liberation is a threat to capitalism globally—we unpack the role that Palestine plays geopolitically in West Asia and the role that West Asia plays in global capital accumulation. We go on to talk about Israel's role as the US's proxy force and attack dog, not just in West Asia, but throughout the globe as well, from Argentina to Guatemala.   We then talk about Trump's so-called "Board of Peace," and its vision for Gaza before discussing what's taking place in the West Bank and the official death of the Two State Solution. We then broaden the conversation out and situate what's happening in Palestine into the context of the United States' quest for geopolitical hegemony, what this means in terms of the Second Cold War with China, and the implications for Palestine, West Asia, and the world at large.  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. Further resources: Jason Hickel's Reserach Global Inequality Project The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, Jason Hickel Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, Jason  Hickel People's Embargo for Palestine Energy Embargo for Palestine Palestinian Youth Movement Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Palestine Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel  How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets with Jason Hickel International Development and Post-capitalism with Jason Hickel  How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel The Green Transition Pt. 1 – The Problem with Green Capitalism Listen to our ongoing series on Iran Listen to our ongoing series on Venezuela Listen to our ongoing series on Cuba Listen to our ongoing series on China Listen to our ongoing series on Mexico Intermission music: "Courage, My Friends!" by Andrew Glencross Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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We hope you enjoy this conversation. It's important to understand that Israel is not like, an ally of the US in the conventional sense of the term, it's a proxy force, right? And this is particularly useful to the US because it allows them to have a degree of plausible deniability for the kinds of crimes that they commit. So the US can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with Israel, including genocide, and then claim that it's not responsible for that violence and the destruction and the war crimes that Israel perpetrates, right?

And that's exactly what we saw happen with the genocide in Palestine, this kind of deniability on the part of the U.S. political class. So my point here is that, is that U.S. support for the Zionist project is not unique. It's exactly in keeping with U.S. strategy. The U.S. supports Israel for the exact same reasons that they undertake any imperialist intervention. It's the exact same reason they've imposed a blockade on Cuba. It's the same reason they destroyed Iraq and Libya and Syria. It's the same reason they've orchestrated assassinations and coups against dozens of

liberation leaders across the global south. It's all the same general objectives, right? Destroy the liberation movements, prevent sovereign development, and maintain the South in position of economic subordination. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. What's lost in the day-to-day news analysis of the mainstream? Press is a structural analysis, an analysis that goes beyond simply narrating the ongoing disasters. Rather, what's needed is something that applies a theoretical and practical analysis that helps us not only understand the forces behind this or that current event,

but crucially, one that helps us intervene. Because as Marx famously wrote way back in 1845, the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point is to change it. In this episode, Part 17 of our ongoing series on Palestine, we're joined again by Jason Hickel for a conversation on the structural forces at play in the war on Palestine, as well as the role that Palestinian liberation plays in the global fight against imperialism and capitalism. Jason Hickle is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University.

of Barcelona and 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 before we get started, upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, our lively online community, and stickers and

bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Jason Hickel. All right, Jason. It's a play. pleasure to have you back on the show. Thanks, Robert. Nice to be with you again. So you've been on the show many times. So I'm sure most of our listeners, either through our show or through the amazing work that you do, would be familiar with who you are. But just in case, maybe if you could just introduce yourself for our listeners

and talk a little bit about the work you do before we dive into Palestine. Okay. So I'm a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. and I work on international political economy and imperialism in the world system and also ecological economics. And I have a couple of books including The Divide, a brief guide to global inequality in its solutions

and less is more how de-growth will save the world. And yeah, so in Barcelona, I also run a research team of brilliance, young academics and researchers working on all these issues too. So always keep an eye out for their papers is in their output, which is really exciting stuff, I think. Awesome. Yeah, that research team has accomplished so much.

It sounds like every time I speak with you, there's new stuff. And I want to ask you about that when we close to kind of tell us a little bit about the most recent stuff you've been working on. And maybe we can link to some of that stuff in the show notes. So today we'll be focusing most of our conversation around Palestine. And I think the first question that I want to ask you about Palestine, is kind of a bigger, broader question. Why has Palestine been so central

in the ongoing struggle for the climate and against colonialism? What role do the Palestinians play? And why has the U.S. and the imperial block that it leads been so driven and hell-bent on destroying the Palestinians? Yeah, I think this is an important question. And so I guess we can kind of start with this niggling curiosity that everyone always has, right,

which is, like, why is it that the U.S. and most of its Western allies clearly actively support the Israeli genocide and its war crimes there, even in the face of massive international condemnation at massive expense and to the point of totally debasing the very frameworks of human rights and international law that they claim to uphold, right? It seems like a paradox. Why would the U.S. do this? So people often resort to narratives about the power of APAC in U.S. elections and other forms of Israeli political intervention in the U.S. And I think that's actually a real force and we can't ignore it. But the reality is that the U.S. ruling class, I think we have to understand, broadly supports Israel's actions with bipartisan consensus, right? So across both the Republican and Democratic parties, because they see Israel's actions as aligned with the interests of U.S. capitalism.

And I think that most other Western governments hold the same position for the same reason. Now, to unpack this a little bit, the key thing to understand is that the capitalist economy is a world system, right? Where profits and growth and consumption in the imperial core relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap labor and resources from the periphery and the semi-periphery of the system or the global south. I remember in an earlier episode on unequal exchange, we spoke about some of the research on this show. kind of the scale of this appropriation, right? There's billions of tons of materials, hundreds of billions of hours of human labor, trillions of dollars of economic value,

net appropriated from the Global South each year to prop up the economies of the Imperial Corps. So this is like a major feature of how capitalism works. Now, in order to maintain this arrangement, the core states need to keep the Global South subordinated as suppliers within global commodity chains that are dominated by Western firms. And to ensure this, they have to suppress sovereign economic development in the Global South

because sovereign developments means the South produces and consumes more for themselves, which means that their labor and their resources become more expensive for the Corps, which in turn constrains the core's consumption and makes profit accumulation very difficult to achieve. So this is the key fact to understand, right? Southern sovereignty is profoundly threatening to Western capitalism. And the core states understand this facts, and they're therefore constantly intervening to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty. And they do it through a whole host of instruments that you've covered on the show many a times, like economic sanctions, structural adjustments, election interference, political assassinations, and of course outright regime change operations. And I think this is kind of the broader trend that we have to understand, because it's precisely why.

the U.S. started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, because they saw Zionism, they saw it as a way to have a kind of military proxy in West Asia, where they could run counterinsurgency operations against the Arab socialist movements and the national liberation struggles that were rising and becoming so popular at that time, right? So the U.S. could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in West Asia, right, in that region, which is at a critical geopolitical location at the hinge of Europe, Asia, and Africa, right? In some ways, it's kind of the center of these continents. And the U.S. wanted to crush the liberation movements and they used Israel to help them do that. So it's important to understand that Israel has a long history of

assassinating political leaders in the region and attacking liberation movements there. Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, over and over and over again. And one of the consequences of this is that these states are then destabilized and also force. to divert their resources toward defensive spending instead of toward industrial development. And so it has the effect of keeping them in a position of weakness and dependency, right? But it's not only in West Asia that Israel behaves like this, it has a long history of providing military and intelligence support to right-wing regimes around the world. So, for example, Israel armed and supported Argentina's U.S.-backed military junta,

which murdered 30,000 socialists and political dissidents. Israel armed and supported the U.S. backed genocide in Guatemala, including training military cadres there in techniques of torture and ethnic cleansing. Over and over and over again, we see this pattern. So it's important to understand that Israel is not like an ally of the U.S. in the conventional sense of the term. It's a proxy force, right? And this is particularly useful to the U.S.

because it allows them to have a degree of plausible deniability for the kinds of crimes that they commit. So the U.S. can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with Israel, including genocide, and then claim that it's not responsible for that violence and the destruction of the war crimes that Israel perpetrates, right?

And that's exactly what we saw happen with the genocide in Palestine, this kind of deniability on the part of the U.S. political class. So my point here is that is that U.S. support for the Zionists, this project is not unique. It's exactly in keeping with U.S. strategy. The U.S. supports Israel for the exact same reasons that they undertake any imperialist intervention. It's exactly the same reason that they incinerated the people of North Korea. It's the exact same reason that they

blasted Nepal across Vietnam. It's the exact same reason they've imposed a blockade on Cuba. It's the same reason they destroyed Iraq and Libya and Syria. It's the same reason they've orchestrated assassinations and coups against dozens of liberation leaders across the global south. It's all the same general objectives, right? Destroy the liberation movements, prevent sovereign development, and maintain the South in position of economic subordination. So if we think about Palestine for a second, the vast majority of the world clearly supports Palestinian liberation.

International law itself supports Palestinian liberation, but the U.S. and its allies reject it. Why is that? It's because they understand that Palestinian liberation would remove a key, U.S. proxy and would open the way to liberation movements elsewhere in the region, right? So a liberated Palestine would mean a liberated West Asia. And a liberated West Asia at the hinge of these continents is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital, right? I mean, imagine a situation where West Asia is liberated and gets to develop on its own terms

and control the flow of its own oil and sell its oil without the U.S. dollar and build alliances with China, et cetera, et cetera, this is totally unacceptable to the Western ruling class. It would totally undermine the dominance of the imperial core in the capitalist world system. And it seems to me, I think it's quite plausible that their assessment, the assessment of U.S. planners, is that Palestinian liberation would very possibly bring about the end of the capitalist world system as it presently exists. It's like, in some ways, Palestine is like the key node of the imperial world system, which is why so much violence is focused on this, right? So this is kind of the situation we're in,

where our ruling classes are willing to back literally genocidal violence in Palestine and completely shred their own claims to human rights and international law with breathtaking hypocrisy, all because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation. This is U.S. policy. It's the policy of the Trump administration, and it was the policy of the Biden administration before him, and all of the hand-wringing that Biden did about oh, there's too many lives, have been lost, blah, blah, with pure propaganda. The Biden administration was actively pursuing a genocide because it was in direct alignment with U.S. policy.

And to me, I think this brings us to an important point, right? Like, we have to realize that the imperial violence that we're seeing is not a side gig of the capitalist world economy. It's a structurally necessary feature of it, right? Like capitalism requires this kind of imperialist violence. And so if we want to mobilize against these atrocities, the genocide in Gaza, the carpet bombing of Iran, the blockade against Cuba, et cetera, et cetera. We have to recognize that these are not individual acts of evil.

They're structurally linked. And we have to ultimately plan to overcome the economic system itself. Like the economic system that perpetuates these crimes, we have to overcome. And in the imperial core, that means we have to build a political machine that is capable of winning power and actually implementing socialism. Because what's powerful about a socialist economy is that it does not require imperialism. imperialist violence in order to function and maintain stability and meet people's needs, right? A capitalist economy does require imperialist violence, and that's why a capitalist economy has to go. And I think that it's important that we start thinking systematically about this.

So I recently read this great quote. I forget who said it, but it was something like this. It was like, you have to fight a system with a system. And I think that's so important, right? Like we have to stop thinking of these as individual acts of evil and understand that we're fighting a system. And we have to fight that system with a system. We have to fight capitalism with socialism. That has to be the focus of our movements. And I think we have to be very clear about that. Yeah, thank you so much for that.

And I mean, I couldn't agree more with you about this like structural necessity that you're talking about. And for me, that's like the most important part in terms of political education. Because especially with Trump in office, you can see how many liberals and progressive liberals and lots of people that don't really associate with any kind of political. ideology outright, they reject these forces under Trump and they associate them with Trump and they don't understand the structure underlying at all, the structure that you just laid out really eloquently. And without that, they'll be supporting the very same policies under a different Democratic administration, for example.

Correct. Exactly. And we see that over and over again. We see that over and over again. And for a guy like me who's like a grizzled 41-year-old, I've seen it too many times, you know. I'm wondering, just to pick a piece out from that response that you just shared with us, can you talk a little bit about why specifically a liberated Palestine would mean a liberated West Asia? And I'm wondering if you're, are you referring to the fact that the popular support for Palestine in West Asia,

which is huge, would result like that Palestinian liberation in itself would necessitate the popular overthrow of these Gulf states that rule with no mandate and which are essentially client states to the United States? Or are you kind of referring to, yeah, maybe if you could just unpack that. Yeah, so I think my argument here is basically that Palestinian liberation entails the removal of Israel as a U.S. proxy, right? Like that would be the consequence, of course, of a democratic Palestinian entity. We would no longer have the apartheid state of Israel in the way it currently exists, right? And so what this means is that with Israel gone as a U.S. proxy, then there would be a lot less leverage that the U.S. has in terms of interventions in West Asia,

in terms of crushing liberation movements and sovereign-seeking states, right? And so those movements would be allowed to develop, and states pursuing sovereignty would be allowed to do that freely. And I think ultimately this would lead to a complete, well, a reorganization of West Asia quite substantially towards something that is. is more independent and where control over production and investment, et cetera, is much less organized around servicing capital accumulation in the core and much more organized around regional development. And this, I think, would be very, again, very destabilizing for Western capitalism,

and they realize that. So basically my argument is like with the removal of the U.S. as a tack dog, its main kind of military outpost in West Asia, then there would be a very severe erosion of the ability of the U.S. to prevent the rise of liberation movements and sovereign-seeking states. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the so-called Board of Peace. What is the Board of Peace, who's in it, and what is their vision for Gaza? Yeah, it's a really strange and bizarre phenomenon, actually.

So the Board of Peace is supposedly intended to oversee the ceasefire in Gaza, and the process of reconstruction and security deployment, according to a UN Security Council resolution. But there are major distortions and problems that we see right off the bat that have raised very serious questions about the whole process. The first being that it is chaired by Donald Trump, who was obviously a participant in the genocide. And so this raises red flags immediately.

And then, of course, furthermore, the executive board of the Board of Peace includes the following individuals. Marco Rubio, known imperialist warmonger, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, clearly a hyper-Zionist, noted war criminal Tony Blair, plus a guy called Mark Rowan,

who's the CEO of a firm called Apollo Global Management, which is a massive U.S. asset management firm, plus a U.S. national security advisor, and then the president of the World Bank, and then finally a guy called Nikolai, Ladinov, who was the UN coordinator for the Oslo Accords. Okay. So in general, this executive board is absolutely packed with Zionists.

Almost all of them fully aligned with U.S. State Department's agendas. And note there's zero Palestinian representation. Okay. So it's egregiously unbalanced. You have most of the figures on this board are Zionists, and you have zero representation from Palestinians. It's actually, it's impossible to imagine something more egregious. in this respects. And then finally, just to make matters worse, it's become clear that Trump has

near total executive power within this Board of Peace. So all of this together has made it has made the board so ridiculous that even Western governments have now refused to join it as members. And I think that of the 65 or so countries that were invited to join as members, only about 20 of them did. And most of them, because they're effectively vassal states of the U.S. And so it's very embarrassing, actually. As for their vision for Gaza, We know that Trump and Kushner envision turning Gaza into what is effectively a strip mall and haven for U.S. capitalists. That's their kind of end goal, at least their explicit narrative for Gaza, right?

But I think for now, there's much bigger things to worry about. For example, the peace deal itself that the border peace is supposed to oversee is terrible and is not at all clear how this is going to move forward, right? So the peace deal calls for the total disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, which is crazy, by the way, given the fact that it is the Israelis who perpetrated the genocide and is therefore the Israelis who should in any sane world be the ones to be disarmed, right? They're clearly the overwhelming threats here. And the Israelis are saying that they want the full disarmament of Hamas to happen before they withdraw from Gaza or else they are pledging to restart the war.

And of course, this is a non-starter because why would Hamas agree to disarm before Israel withdraws? this would be clearly suicidal for them. And so there's obviously a stalemate here. Now, ultimately, the idea is that Gaza will be administered by a technocratic council of Palestinian individuals called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, which would be supervised by the Board of Peace, and then security would be provided by a police force.

But here again, it's crazy to me that basically you have this technocratic body, right, that is actually supervised by this executive board, packed full of Zionists, many of whom were cheerleaders or perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza. And the process they went to implement would make Gaza totally vulnerable to Israeli aggression. I just don't see how any of this can be considered legitimate. And it certainly does not provide any kind of viable way forward. I think there's very serious problems ahead.

And it's not at all clear how the so-called Board of Peace is going to resolve that. And another thing that I wanted to bring in is that the board offers lifetime terms. And so this is just a board to purportedly manage a ceasefire in Gaza, which one would hope would not be a process that would take anybody's lifetime. So should we be thinking about this differently? Like is this board a vehicle for something that goes beyond Palestine? Yeah, I think this is also what's worried a lot of a lot of other world leaders, right? Which is that so the board, as you as you point out, is supposed to focus on Gaza. but apparently in its original charter, it actually didn't mention Gaza at all.

So the original charter that Trump circulated to invited members didn't mention Gaza. It's clearly much broader than that. And it transpires now that what Trump actually wants the board to become is something like his own version of the United Nations. So a kind of global governance body that he controls because he's a megalomaniac, and which would ultimately give him some kind of international power through this board, right? And I think this is, I mean, it's interesting because even, because even like allies in his genocide, in the U.S. genocide, U.S. Israeli genocide in Palestine, have called this out as crazy, right? Like, they clearly recognize that this is some kind of bizarre move to kind of replace the U.N.

or provide a competitor to the U.N., which is just wild to consider. So it's just, it's just lunacy. but unfortunately we live in a world where lunacy actually, you know, attains material reality. So I'm not sure what's going to happen on that front, but that's the condition we're in. Yeah, I want to come back to that larger conversation about sort of the reshifting of all these global institutions and what that means in terms of the U.S. is sort of new blatant outright domination, not even trying to use soft power in the same ways that it used to. But let's stick with Palestine for a little bit longer.

Specifically, I want to talk about the West Bank. What's been happening there now and how has that process connected? How is that process connected to the efforts to outright colonize the Palestinians? Yeah, it's terrible. What's happening in the West Bank right now? So while the world's attention has been focused on Gaza because of the genocide, and now, of course, focused on Iran, Israel has basically taken the opportunity to absolutely terrorized the West Bank, and it's been really horrible. Like we're talking

like massive land grabs in the West Bank, widespread ethnic cleansing, like whole Palestinian communities have been forcefully removed, basically erased. The Israelis have killed over 1,100 people in the West Bank since October 2023. So basically, as the genocide has been inflicted on Gaza, they've been doing something very similar in the West Bank, but was much less media attention. Among those 1,100 people killed. in the West Bank, there have been more than 200 children massacred, right? So it just gives you a scale of the kind of atrocity crimes we're talking about here. Settler militias have been allowed to rampage through Palestinian communities, attacking Palestinian families, destroying their homes,

burning their crops, burning their vehicles, terrorizing people. I mean, there's footage of this all over the internet now, and it's absolutely disgusting to watch because you really get a sense for kind of the attitude of supremacy that these settlers have. And the total impugnation they operate with, like sometimes even with Israeli military attachments that effectively stand guard as they inflict these pogroms on the Palestinians. And then to make matters worse, now, just a few weeks ago, the Israeli government has announced plans to effectively annex the West Bank, right, annex meaning colonized, steel, etc., which triggered global outrage again. And we have to remember, I think, that Israel, like, this is interesting, because Israel now, over the past several

like several months has made it very clear that it explicitly rejects the two-state solution. They're very clear about this, and this is a huge development because this effectively removes the fig leaf that Israel and his Western backers have relied on for decades saying, you know, eventually we're going to have a two-state solution,

just hang on, just wait, if you can just be patient, blah, blah, blah, while Israel, meanwhile, establishes facts on the ground, taking more territory, ethnically cleansing people. But now, this effectively means that, like, with the two-state solution, fig leaf gone, it means that Israel will explicitly govern the territory as an apartheid regime, right?

So the 3 million people who live in the West Bank will be held under permanent military occupation with outright denial of the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. This is naked apartheid. And of course, it has been naked apartheid, like as the de facto reality since 1967. But now, again, with the PR cover of the two-state future eliminated, it's clearly explicit. and apartheid is now basically official Israeli policy. And I think this should be a clarifying moment for all of us, right? This should sharpen our demands because apartheid, which again is now the official policy,

is obviously unacceptable. It's a crime against humanity. And it very clearly cannot be accepted and has to be abolished. We simply cannot tolerate the existence of an apartheid regime. Any apartheid state has to be dismantled and replaced just as it was in South Africa. In fact, there's a precedent for this, right? South Africa is the precedent of an apartheid regime. that was intolerable to humanity and was dismantled and replaced.

And that's what has to happen in the case of Israel. And sticking with the region here, do you see the war against Iran essentially? We spoke with Bikram Gil last week, part of our Iran series, and he was talking about how the war against Iran is really an extension of the genocide of the Palestinians and how, again, going back to how we began this conversation, that the centrality of the struggle for Palestinian liberation in terms of the ongoing imperialist incursions in West Asia. Do you see the war in Iran that was just started as sort of part of this and an extension of this? And what do you see as the vision that the United States wants to impose on Iran as well

in terms of, say, regime change or controlling the flows of oil, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, I think clearly we have to see the invasion of Iran as part of the broader U.S. strategy of attacking and de-developing sovereign-seeking states in West Asia. So in this sense, like as I was saying earlier, I think the U.S. is attacking Iran for exactly the same reasons that it supports the Zionist project. So it's clearly like a connection there. But I think there's also an element of this that is directly related to the genocide in Palestine. Because we know that Israel has wanted to go to war against Iran for the past 40 years. I mean, this is something that Netanyahu himself has said repeatedly. It's a long-signing goal of the Zionist regime.

And the reason they want to do that is because they know that Iran is one of the few countries in the world that materially supports the Palestinian liberation struggle, right? And Israel understands that there's no way they can achieve their ultimate objectives of fully colonizing Palestine and establishing greater Israel, as long as there are powerful states in the region that can stop them. So Israel has systematically sought to remove these obstacles. right, Iraq, Libya, Syria have all toppled, and now they're going after Iran, which has always been on the agenda, always been on the cards as an objective for them. So yeah, as far as Israel's concerned,

this is a direct extension of the genocide and is being done for the same reasons. And I think it's worth noting actually also that Israel is using the exact same tactics that they've used in Gaza, right? They're bombing hospitals, they're bombing schools, residential areas, destroying civilian facilities. They've killed more than a thousand Iranian civilians. They've massacred more than 300 children. In fact, one of the first acts of the war by the U.S. and Israel was attacks on a school that massacred over 160 children. This is war crime after war crime, exactly as they were doing in Gaza. So that's Israel's side. I mean, the U.S. is also wanting to attack Iran for ages, right? But they've always understood that this is really not a war they can win. So they've ultimately

refrains for the most part and stuck to kind of trying to weaken Iran with sanctions and so on. It looks like this time, Nazanayao has basically figured out that he could convince Trump to do it anyhow, and this seems to have worked. And of course, there's also a role here, I think, played by Hegset and Kushner and Rubio, who were just, like, very aggressive on this issue. I think it's possible that Trump was hyped up by the success of his operation of Venezuela and thought he could do a repeat of this. I mean, he was clearly very excited about the pound or he was able to unleash in that respect. And here, I think, you know, we have to be furious with European leaders

who totally failed to condemn or punish Trump for the Venezuela invasion. I mean, this is crazy, right? This is an obvious violation of international law. We cannot accept to live in a world where the U.S. can just invade and abduct the leader of whatever country they want to. I mean, we can't live in such a world. And European leaders should have been very clear about that and imposed consequences, but they failed to do so, right?

And as a result, Trump, he faced no consequences and therefore was able to think about going after Iran in a similar kind of whale. This time it's obviously much more substantial. So, I mean, this is the kind of problem we end up with when European leaders who claim to be supporters of international law and blah, blah, blah, failed to impose any consequences for this kind of behavior. I mean, this kind of double standard leads to very dangerous situations. And that's exactly what we're living in right now. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Jason Hickle. We'll be right back.

The empire is crumbling fast. If citizens want to survive, they can't count on rules from the past, when privilege kept them alive. But people who've seen this before, who've always lived under the gun. No colonization is war And I know that the war can be won Courage, my friends, the ends of our rope

Are woven together in this crucial hour Courage, my friends, in action lies hope, In organization lies power The taxes our leaders demand Fun violence all over the earth From Venezuela to Sudan They rob them of all that they're worth But we hear a song in the air

Resistance is drawing the line Cuba de jere In Greenland and in Palestine Courage, my friends, the ends of our rope are woven together in this crucial hour. Courage, my friends, in action lies hope, in organization lies power. Always know it would come, you're not alone. This planet from which all life springs has room for all life if we try, we try, we're We just need to topple the keys who think they deserve the whole pie.

My friends, the ends of our rope are woven together in this crucial hour. Courage, my friends, in action lies hope, in organization lies power. That was courage, my friends, yet may be near, but we stand together to start it again. Courage, my friends, we all feel the fear. Let us choose courage, my friends. That was Courage, My Friends, by Andrew Glencross.

Now back to our conversation with Jason Hickle. I want to talk about the frustration that I think a lot of people have on the left when we bring China into the conversation is that China's not doing enough to go beyond their more like economic development based interventions in the world that like it's really time right now and not just China but when you look at Mexico and the concessions that were made by Shinebaum and you look at the strategic retreat in Venezuela under Delci Rodriguez, these are all decisions that make sense, I think, in terms of when looking at these specific states and their strategy for dealing with U.S. imperialism. But also a question that I have

is, is it going to be too late? You know, like the United States seems to be moving pretty heavily towards retaking explicit control of a lot of the nodes of either resistance or or energy production, et cetera, that maybe it did not have such a firm grasp over in the last decades. I'm wondering what you think about that. And if these states are not doing enough to sort of intervene in this process, like, do you think that this is going to be a mistake moving forward? Or, yeah, just curious about your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's interesting. So in terms of China, I mean, I, of course, share your concerns on this. Like, I think that, A lot of us would like to see more active assistance from China to some of these countries

that are coming under extremely heavy pressure and invasion. So my understanding from speaking to people in China is that the current position is basically this, right? On the one hand, the priority is to kind of like keep a low profile and try to build up enough capacity to defeat the U.S. and like in the future inevitable U.S. invasion. Okay. Like, basically their assessment is eventually the U.S. is going to come to war with China. What we want to do is we want to use the time we have now as much as possible to build a capacity to resist this.

And so if we kind of enter ourselves into a direct conflict with the U.S. right now, then we might disrupt that possibility for the future, right? So that's kind of like the, I guess, the kind of strategic aim. At the same time, their idea is, okay, we're going to provide some direct support, in the form of say solar panels for Cuba to help with its like help defend against the embargo imposed by the US and then like some defense equipment for Iran et cetera et cetera and then their broader strategy is okay let's keep investing in the in the Belt and Road initiative the BRI to kind of create the conditions for delinking and southern sovereignty right to enable like other

global South countries to reduce their exploitation by the core and develop their capacity for a South South trade and a little bit more economic. independence, et cetera, et cetera, because China basically assesses that its future safety and sovereignty is contingence on the future sovereignty of global south countries, which is why they're investing so heavily in the BRI, right? So from China's perspective, they're doing a lot on this front, but again, it's certainly not the kind of direct military assistance, direct and active military assistance and alliances that we saw the USSR give to countries facing U.S. imperialist aggression in the 20th century. Or a

China giving two countries during the malice period, right? So it's maybe less satisfying than that front, and I agree. But I think that's kind of China's current assessment, although who knows what's in the mind of the leaders of the CPC. As for the other question about Latin America, for example, and like why aren't we seeing alliances there? I think this is a major strategic error. There's a major strategic error, and alliances do need to happen.

I think that's really urgent. Right now in Latin America, it seems that each government is trying, to kind of negotiate improved terms with the U.S. alone privately, and they're hoping this is going to give them some safety and protection. And it might, you know, do that for a short period of time, but I think it's extremely dangerous because it should be apparent to everybody that the U.S. is absolutely willing to betray you at any time, right? It has zero obligations to even people it considers its allies. And I think that it would be much more strategic for Latin American states to begin to develop a regional defense alliance and regional cooperation

to the point of being capable of withstanding U.S. aggression in the future. I think this is absolutely the kind of direction they should take. But there appears to be very little mobilization in this direction right now. I think one of the problems they face is that is that the era of the pink tide where like a plurality of Latin American states during the pink tide era were left leaning, right? that was a period during which this could have been achieved. But the U.S. understood that, and they intervenes, to systematically weaken those governments and remove them from power.

And we now have a much different situation where we have, in several major countries, we have right-wing governments in place or soon-to-date power, and that's really weakened the ability of Latin American governments to build this kind of progressive alliance. It's a very depressing situation, but it's very urgent that there's mobilization on this, because otherwise, you know, the region's in real trouble. So thinking about maybe something like the Alliance of Sahel states in terms of like a defense pact. I think that's exactly what Latin America needs to try to achieve. And also I think in addition to that, I think they need to find ways to delink themselves from their dependence on the U.S. economically, right?

And what that means is they need to find alternatives to their dependence on specific U.S. technologies and capital goods and start developing those themselves. Now, a lot of countries, in Latin America do not have the capacity to do that. And they're very small in some cases, and they would not even be able to develop that capacity. But this is where I think the concept of regional planning can become very effective. And this is an idea that was advanced by, you know, Samir Amin and others in the 1960s and 70s, which is the idea that, look, if we ban together, then what we can be able to do is build our own technological independence, right? And so we can plan for, okay, who's going to be producing the computers, who's going to be producing

the aircraft, who's going to be producing the whatever, the semiconductors or the solar panels, and kind of like have a planned division of labor around this in order to build some strategic autonomy. This is absolutely possible to do. This is exactly what Europe has done, by the way, with, say, for example, the production of Airbus. They realized they could not accept a situation where they're dependent entirely on Boeing, a U.S.

company, but they also knew they could not, as individual states, build up their own commercial aircraft. And so they did it collectively, right? And as a result of collaboration amongst European states, they have Airbus. And I think that something exactly like that could easily happen in Latin America. It's a region of, what is it, 600, 700 million people. There's no question that they could be producers of their own capital goods and their own key technologies. And therefore dramatically reduce their dependence on US finance and US trade. And this would very significantly improve their deterrence. So obviously you inaugurated our China series part one and I believe you traveled to

China after that. So I'm wondering maybe I think anybody who's listened to that episode will have some sense of your views on China, of course, but did you develop any new ideas about, you know, your thoughts on China or China in terms of the conversation we're having right now with the second Cold War that seems to be taking place right now, at least the, the, initial parts of it or any kind of just experiences that you'd want to share as kind of like an update, I guess, to the last time we spoke, which I think was maybe about a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago. Yeah, I visited China in April last year. And it was an incredible experience for me. I was part of a broader delegation. And during that time, we met with

hundreds of figures like journalists, editors, writers, academics, economists, politicians, communist party members, across the whole spectrum in Shanghai and Beijing. And it was a totally enlightening and transformative experience for me because it really hammered home for me just how big the gap is between Western perceptions of what is going on in China and the actual reality on the grounds. And so it's like, it really like pummels you with this realization, right? And so, yeah, I've got so much I got so what I could talk about in that respect. I mean, really, it was very, very powerful for me, and I'd love to come on again and talk about at some point. But I suppose, I suppose for the

purposes of this conversation, speaking of China, I think that what's clear is that, like, this kind of acceleration of imperial violence that we're kind of seeing right now, this kind of sharpening that's going on, I think is in large parts driven by some key structural transformations in the world economy right now. And I think that the rise of China is actually quite central to that. So the rise of China is posing a major threat to Western capital accumulation right now in several respects, I guess. One would be the fact that their development has led to a very dramatic increase in wages in China. I forget the exact figures, but something like an eightfold increase in the manufacturing wage, in the real manufacturing

wage since 2005 or something like that. Now what this means is that it's very dramatically reducing the scale of Western appropriation from China through an equal exchange. So the West is reduced in its capacity to appropriate value from China. And appropriating value from China was a big chunk of the total value that it appropriated from the Global South through an equal exchange. So that's one thing. This is putting pressure on the West. The second thing is that there's been very dramatic technological development in China, right? And what that's doing is, obviously, this is beneficial for China's own independence, but it's also providing other global South countries with access to alternative suppliers of technological goods and capital

goods, which means they can get them for a more affordable price without going to the core states, therefore reducing their dependency on the core and limiting their own exposure to unequal exchange, right? Because the less you're dependent on the core, the less you're exposed to the kinds of unequal exchanges that the core inflicts on you through that trade relationship. And then the final element, I guess, would be the Belt and Road Initiative. So again, this is basically creating options for South-South trade and delinking for other global South countries. And I think the West is looking at this and realizing, like, it's now in quite a desperate situation because this is undermining some of the key tenets of the capitalist world economy.

And it seems to me that they're kind of desperate now to find some way to restore the imperial arrangements, and they're resorting to very massive violence to achieve this, right? Now, it's interesting because some people are now saying that it looks like the U.S. is planning to withdraw from Asia and establish more hegemony over Latin America. Others are obviously saying, look, there's no real evidence for this. Clearly, like, the U.S. military bases remain in Asia. Those are not being dismantled, so we'll believe it when you see it. Look, they're invading Iran, so they're clearly not in the process of withdrawing from Asia. And also, even if this does happen, even if they do withdraw from Asia, their goal is probably to try to build up the capacity in the Western

hemisphere to eventually succeed in some kind of future attack against China, in kind of a like a bid to reestablish global hegemony down the line, which of course be very, very difficult to achieve. So these are some of the changes that I think are happening in the world system right now, which are destabilizing for capitalism in the core and are creating the possibility for a transformation in the world system. But of course, what that transformation ends up looking like depends entirely on the balance of class power and the strength and resistance movements. And I also want to ask you, I want to kind of bring up the climate question as well, because obviously the United States is, as you put it, the sharpening of its imperialist

ambitions is having a huge impact environmentally, not just in terms of the environmental destruction that's being caused by these bombing campaigns, but also in terms of the massive amounts of resources that go into fueling the world's largest military. What is the, and this is a very broad question, so feel free to attack it from whatever direction you'd like, but like what is the environmental and climate impact moving forward in terms of this increasingly bifurcated world between the United States, which is really doubling down on hydrocarbon. and trying to create a world or maintain a world in which they control the flow of energy and that energy being oil versus we know that China still has a lot of coal production and that

kind of thing, but are definitely, China is definitely moving towards a more renewable future and they obviously have a much less militaristically impactful, environmentally impactful system on their side. what are the global implications for if the United States continues to and is able to sort of achieve this aim of really retrenching oil and hydrocarbons as the primary energy sorts of the globe and continues with this wild, militaristic, violent warlike behavior into the future? Yeah, I think this is important. And I think, like, again, quite a clarifying moment for the climate movements in, in your, Europe and the US, because it's abundantly clear now that the reason we're not seeing action against climate change on anything like the scale that is required is because of capitalism.

Here's the thing, is that fossil fuels are extremely profitable, and they are more profitable than renewables. And this is precisely the reason that we're not seeing sufficient investment in renewables, and capital continues to flow instead to fossil fuels. So it's crucial to understand, right, which is that, which is that, which is, that we will not be able to achieve our climate objectives under capitalism, because under capitalism, production and investment are organized around profit maximization, and so they flow towards what is most profitable. And that means that we're not going to get sufficiently

rapid investments in renewable energy, and that is abundantly clear now. In fact, it was not long ago that some of the major U.S. investment firms like BlackRock, et cetera, some of the major Western investment firms came out and explicitly said, we're actually going to start, like, abandoning our climate commitments because what we've realized is that green transition is not as profitable as traditional dirty industries. And so we're going to make more investments in the dirty industries in order to maximize profits. This is absolutely crazy, but it should be abundantly clear to us that as a result, we cannot achieve, we will not be able to achieve our climate objectives as long as we're subordinated to the capitalist law of value. That's going to have to be overcome.

So one problem with this situation here is the capitalist law of value, right, that production and investment are organized around profit maximization. The other problem here is that the U.S. recognizes that its geopolitical hegemony and its dominant position in the world system depends in very large parts on oil. So in a scenario where the world shifts away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy, this completely cuts off a huge pillar. of U.S. imperial power, which is the fact that the trade in fossil fuels is denominated in U.S. dollars, right, which produces perpetual demand for the U.S. dollar and gives the U.S. an enormous imperial privilege in the world economy as a result. So this is a reason why it's very unlikely we're going to see any serious effort by the U.S. to decarbonize, and we're likely also to see efforts by the U.S. to prevent the decarbonization of the rest of the world in order

to maintain fossil fuel dominance as universally as possible. I think that this is something that we have to face up to, right? And realize that, like, if we're going to have an environmentalist movement, one of its key objectives is going to have to be overcoming capitalism in the United States and in the rest of the imperial core and subordinating production to a different law of value, in other words, organizing investment and production around human needs and ecology rather than profit maximization. And I think that really we're at this point in the environmentalist movement that

until that's understood, we are going to consistently continue to fail to achieve our objectives. And I really can't drive this home enough. This is why I strongly believe that that mobilizing for a socialist alternative is absolutely crucial to achieving ecological objectives. I realize I actually forgot to answer the second part of your earlier question, which was about China and its role in the transition here in terms of climate. And so actually there's a piece of research that we just finished recently and is under review now, which is about the 1.5 degree Paris Target, right? So we know that in 2025 global surface temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels for the first time. Now, this probably is not going to be a permanent condition.

Probably it will go down a little bit before the multi-year average actually exceeds 1.5, but that's not very far off. But so the question here becomes, who is responsible for, for the excess emissions in the atmosphere that caused us to reach 1.5 degrees, therefore breaching the lower bound of the Paris Agreement. And we can assess this by looking at national emissions from 1992, which was the year that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was implemented, where governments agreed for the first time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an equitable way. So if we look at national emissions versus their fair shares of the 1.5 degree carbon budget from 1992 until 2025, this is what we found.

We found that the United States was single-handedly responsible for nearly 50% of total emissions in excess of the 1.5 degree fair shares, meaning they're 50% responsible for breaching the Paris Agreement's threshold. China, by contrast, is 1% responsible. So it really gives you a sense for the dramatic disparity. So the vast majority, I think it's something like 80 or 90% of the total responsibility is held by the states of the imperial core, and China, 1%. So there's a really dramatic disparity here between the public-facing narrative that we have in the West, that China is the main problem behind climate breakdown, etc., etc., and the reality, which is that China has historically been quite well within its fair share of safe carbon budgets,

only recently beginning to exceed them, but also is by far and away dominating the rest of the world when it comes to renewable energy deployment. And scientists now agree that China is credibly on track to reduce emissions to zero by 2060, therefore exceeding its fair share of the effort necessary to bring the world to climate stability. This is important to understand that it's in fact a socialist economy using industrial policy in the global south that is achieving this incredible feat. And it is not the market economies of the imperial core. And I want to emphasize here that the reason China has been able to do this is because China

has, again, industrial policy. They have public control over finance, and they can direct finance and production, even in the private sector, using credit guidance and so on, towards achieving objectives outlined in the national development plans. So they can align production, not with the capitalist law of value, but with social and ecological goals. And this is one reason why we're seeing China really leapfrog ahead of the West on this. When I was in China, one of the things that I really noticed was, okay, so I took the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing. And along that route, which is just incredible, by the way, like easily one of the most well-developed, advanced high-speed rail

networks have ever been on in my life. And I live in Europe, you know, which has several of them. Along the way, you see hundreds of thousands of trees that are being planted. Massive reforestation of the countryside in China. And this is staggering because it is not profitable to plant trees. Think about the scale of the labor you have to organize and pay to plant trees on this kind of scale. Capital would not do this because it's not profitable to do, right? Like it simply would not mobilize production to achieve that. But in China, they can because investment in production,

is not ultimately governed by the capitalist law of value. And just before we wrap up, just to bring the conversation back to Palestine real quick, if you want to like share any words or any invitations for people who are listening who maybe want to get more involved or are wondering what they can do in terms of intervening in their own way against what's happening in terms of the genocide and the ongoing war against the Palestinians, broadening it out to the Iranians and people in Lebanon and all over the world who are sort of suffering under the United States' boot. I know you're based in Spain and I think that Europeans and the United

States, people here share a lot of responsibility in terms of our role as actors in the Imperial Corps and the benefits that we get from this unequal exchange and all of that, not that we have any say in it, But what are some of your invitations or thoughts on how people can get involved and do something moving forward to help intervene? Yeah, so look, I think that there's very practical steps that people can take. There are movements that are very actively involved in trying to, I guess, kind of block some of the key pathways that enable the genocide in Palestine, such as people's embargo for Palestine is an interesting group and also energy. Bargo for Palestine, which is based in the UK. And then there's the Palestinian youth movements, which has several initiatives along these lines. I think increasingly the activists who are involved in these organizations understand that what people in the Imperial Corps can do is think about

supply chains, right? So who are the suppliers of the Israeli war machine? And what are the major Western firms that are profiting from war against Palestine and also against Iran? And what can be done within Western states themselves to bring that to light and to create pressure, right? This is also what Frances Galbanese's recent dossier in her role as UN Special Rapporteur was focused on achieving, right? Like, think about the economics that enable the Israeli genocide and Israeli war crimes and see what can be done kind of upstream. So that's one thing.

The second thing is just to reiterate what I was trying to argue before, which is that, Ultimately, if we want to see an end to the many-headed hydra of imperialist violence, then we can't just be cutting off one head at a time, right? We have to go for the body, which is the capitalist system. And to do that, we have to be able to mobilize political movements, political parties, that are actually capable of taking power and implementing actual socialism. This has to be an objective. Otherwise, in our lifetimes, we will not see an end to these genocidal tendencies.

So this is crucial. I think that there are interesting, you know, movements in this direction. We can see how popular socialist movements are within the West, like when they get a shot, right? Like, look how popular Zora Mamdani's campaign was in New York City. And look at the Green Party in the UK, which has recently completely transformed into an eco-socialist party. I mean, immediate connection to people, immediate popularity in the polls to the point of of even outstripping labor. This is very dramatic transformation, right?

And this is, it's so interesting to me because, like, we're in a situation right now where there's widespread, popular discontent with our ruling class establishments, right? People realize that we're run by gangs of pedophiles. They realize that shadowy elites are unaccountable to democratic power, and they're enraged.

They're struggling to make ends meet. They realize that we're facing climate catastrophe. They're watching our ruling classes impose genocide on people over and over and over again. It's intolerable and they're ready for a change. And as soon as parties emerge that speak in this kind of populist language and connect with people on these basic bread and butter and ethical issues, they are ready to support them. And I think this is exactly the kind of direction we need to be taking right now. We need a left populism that can tap into this kind of sentiment and build a powerful base. But it has to be more

than just narrative power, right? It has to be more than just nice campaign sloganeering. We have to actually build organizations, right? Like organized communities so that we can defend against the inevitable onslaught of propaganda backlash that will definitely come from the media and from ruling class establishment forces against such a movement, right? We have to be prepared for that. And the only way to do that to withstand such an assault is to have very tight organizations.

So I think that's really the challenge that we face right now. and what we should be working on. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and 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.

Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Andrew Glencross for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes,

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