Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism

by Jason Hickel |Transnational Institute

A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen. It’s funny, like I’m always asked to talk about ecology, when really what I want to talk about is capitalist imperialism, and the two are just are a piece of the same problem, right? The ecological crisis is ultimately playing out along colonial lines, right? We know that it is the countries of the imperial core that are overwhelmingly responsible, and specifically their ruling classes, who control the means of production and energy systems and investment, et cetera, et cetera, are overwhelmingly responsible for the excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown, right? We know that’s a fact. We also know it’s a fact that the Global South suffers the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown, right?

The people who have contributed literally nothing to the crisis whatsoever, not contributed a small amount, contributed nothing, right? And it’s not just, of course, climate breakdown that we face. There’s also other dimensions of the ecological crisis, and here too, we see the same thing playing out. When it comes to excess material use in the world economy, overwhelmingly, it’s due to excess material use and accumulation in the imperial core. Half of the material that’s used in the core is net appropriated from the periphery, from the territories of the Global South, right? Which causes severe damage. You don’t see this damage in Sussex or in Finland. You see it in the Congo, you see it in Indonesia, right? You see it in Bolivia, in the frontiers of extraction. The core benefits and everyone else suffers.

The ecological crisis represents processes of colonization and appropriation, and also is a disaster that’s playing out along colonial lines. I think that’s really important to spell out. And if we’re not attentive to those colonial dimensions, I really think we’re fundamentally missing the point. We’re fundamentally missing the point. The other thing I want to point out here is that we were in this incredible paradox, right, where the world economy, we know, is just massively productive, like our productive capacities are incredible. Think of the scale of the labor that humanity has at its disposal, the resources, the technology, the factories, the energy, the materials. Incredible amounts of production to the point of breaking past ecological limits, and yet, the vast majority of the human population lives in conditions of massive deprivation. 80% of the population can’t meet basic needs. So what explains this incredible paradox?

It’s ultimately our system of production, the social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of production, capitalism, where our productive capacities, our incredible productive capacities, are organized overwhelmingly around what is most profitable to capital and what can most facilitate accumulation in the core, rather than what is obviously necessary to meet human needs and achieve our ecological objectives. And so we’re in this wild place where it’s like, oh, solving poverty is just going to take generations, right? If we’re lucky, we’ll get people above $1.90 a day by the end of the century, right? The climate crisis, who can figure out how to solve this? It seems intractable. None of this is true. It’s lies. These are problems that can be very easily solved and very quickly.

The problem is that we don’t have control over our own productive capacities, because we don’t have an economic democracy, right? Some of us live in political democracies, where, from time to time, we get to elect government officials, but when it comes to the economic system, not even the pretense of democracy is allowed to exist, and that is ultimately the contradiction we face, I think, right? This is a crisis that, at its root, is about capitalism, and can only be resolved by overcoming that fact. And the antidote to capitalism is economic democracy, that we should have collective democratic control over what we are producing, what the goals of our production are, who benefits from our production, and so on. And when we do, we can solve these problems quickly, right? We know exactly what to do.

The problem is we don’t have the power. And so I think that, in the face of this crisis, we have to have clarity about what has to be achieved, and we have to start building the movements that are capable of achieving that. For the South, there’s another element I think we have to pay attention to, which is that they need economic sovereignty, right? They need economic liberation at a national level first. The Global North is overwhelmingly responsible for the crisis, but the Global South, we know, also needs to engage in ecological planning, energy transition, et cetera, et cetera. How does anyone expect them to do that when they do not have sovereign control over their own resources, their own labor, their own lands, their own energy, right? Under the thumb of structural adjustment programs that prevent them from using progressive industrial policy, prevent them from using progressive fiscal policy, prevent them from using progressive monetary policy, basic tools that we know can allow them to achieve developments and ecological transition, they are effectively denied from using.

What is the solution to that for the South is struggles for economic liberation right? Now, I think we have to be cognizant of the facts that a struggle for economic liberation in the South is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist world economy, because accumulation in the core depends utterly on the cheapening of labor and resources in the Global South. It depends utterly on that and has for the past 500 years. And so any attempt by liberation struggles in the periphery to achieve economic independence, to use their own resources for their own development, for their own ecological transition, for their own human needs, is destabilizing for capital in the core, and capital reacts with the most extraordinary violent backlashes. We see it happening all the time. Now, it is Palestine before it was Libya, before it was Iraq, before it was Chile, before it was Indonesia, before it was the Congo. It will never stop. It’s over and over again.

And I think the situation in Palestine right now, we have to understand, is not primarily a moral one. That’s how we think of it. That is not how capital thinks of it. For them, it is a matter of suppressing and crushing liberation movements, because a liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen, and they’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t. And so I think that’s really what we face, right? It’s the world system, dimension of the violence that we’re seeing, and we have to be cognizant of that, and our struggles and our resistance have to be in proportion.