jasonhickel.bsky.social
Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE • Author of THE DIVIDE and LESS IS MORE • Global inequality, political economy and ecological economics
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This coup was carried out only a year after the US-backed coup in Iran, and was one of dozens that would be inflicted against progressive, socialist, or otherwise anti-imperialist leaders across the global South over the decades that followed.
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In the wake of the coup, Guatemala was ruled by a series of brutal right-wing dictatorships for the next forty-two years, all with US support. The military regime massacred 200,000 Mayans, in what scholars have described as a genocide.
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Providing decent living standards for 8.5 billion people requires only 30% of current global energy and material use.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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CNN, in a report posted today: "The Israeli military said its forces opened fire multiple times"
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"For a third day running"....
This statement was posted by the UN yesterday. www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...
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Read the article here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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In the UK, only 17% of people support Israel, while the share supporting Palestinians is consistently and substantially higher. yougov.co.uk/topics/polit...
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According to separate work by Pew Research Center, negative views of Israel are on the rise. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavourable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in 2022. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
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If the ePDF doesn't work for you, here is a direct free PDF download: www.jasonhickel.org/s/A-call-for...
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To clarify, this represents share of responsibility of conflicts that are documented in the EJ Atlas, not of all conflicts that have existed or continue to exist.
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Babies that are about to die of starvation are already in an acute state of malnutrition, massively more vulnerable to infant and child mortality. This is intentional. This is genocide by the Zionist regime, and there is no other word to describe it.
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-Libya... the US is using the country they destroyed in 2011, and which remains extremely weak and vulnerable to imperial pressure.
Evil doesn't even begin to describe what we are witnessing. All with the complicity of Western leaders and the cowardly silence of the Western press.
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-It seems the US objective was to clear out this one US-Israeli citizen prior to letting Israel impose its violent endgame on Gaza.
-Meanwhile, the US has been pressing Libya to take 1 million Palestinians, who will be ethnically cleansed by Israel.
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None of this is inevitable. We can and should extend the principles of democracy into the economy. We know, empirically, that under these conditions it is possible to end deprivation and provide good lives for 8.5 billion people with less energy and resources than we presently use.
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Ultimately, this is not a question of who has the power to consume, but who has the power to produce. Capital determines what we produce, and thus determines the shape and direction of our civilisation. If we do not have democratic control over production, then we cannot say we live in a democracy.
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Second, our dollars do not equal votes because we cannot buy things that are not being produced. We may want renewable energy, affordable housing, public transit. But if these are not being produced—because capital does not consider it profitable—then no amount of waving our dollars will change it.
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First, if dollars equal votes, then clearly some people have much more voting power than others. A single individual with a billion dollars would have more voting power than 66,000 workers earning the minimum wage. There is clearly nothing democratic about this.
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A critic may say that capitalism is democratic because every person gets to “vote with their dollars”. According to this argument, consumers get to determine the direction of the economy, which ends up serving people’s needs in the most efficient possible way. But this argument does not hold water.
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The result is that despite having extraordinarily high production to the point of blowing past planetary boundaries, we nonetheless fail to ensure that everyone has access to basic goods and services. Human deprivation is widespread. This represents a massive misallocation of resources.
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When you govern a system like this, it leads to perverse outcomes. We end up with massive overproduction of damaging and unnecessary things because they are profitable to elites, but chronic underproduction of socially necessary things if they are less profitable or not profitable at all.
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And as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs, achieve social progress, or to realise democratically ratified objectives. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit and power — that is the overriding goal.
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Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big financial firms, the large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They determine what to produce, how to use our collective labour and resources, and what to do with the surplus we generate.
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Yes, many of us live in democratic *political* systems, where we get to elect national leaders every few years. But when it comes to the economy, the system of production — which shapes the direction of our society — not even a pretence of democracy is allowed to enter.
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If Western governments had any sense they would realise this fact, work to re-establish the rule of law, and try to establish the moral basis for mutual respect and cooperation with the rest of the world.
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In the 21st century, the West will find itself isolated from the world majority, and the world will move on without them.
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If you think people will be willing to tolerate this going forward, you are mistaken. As Southern states begin to develop the capacity to reject Western hegemony, they will not hesitate to do so.
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Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority. They spit on humanity. 500 years on from the beginning of the European colonial project and they have hardly changed in this regard.