The Age of Imperialism is Not Over—But We Can End It

Really good article by Jason Hickel. Hickel’s The Divide is one of the best books I’ve ever read on world inequality, and climate change. Good to see him writing for Current Affairs.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/12/the-age-of-imperialism-is-not-over-but-we-can-end-it

Capitalist accumulation has always depended on cheap labor and resources extracted from the Global South. To end this violence we need a post-capitalist transition—otherwise, as climate breakdown accelerates, the ceaseless search for profit will drive us further into barbarism.

Jason Hickel

(An excerpt):

s the failure of COP26 sinks in, it is increasingly clear that our leaders have neither the courage nor the will to respond effectively to ecological breakdown. This is not surprising. The ecological crisis is being driven by capitalist growth, which is tearing through the living world at a staggering pace, with the rich states and corporations of the global North responsible for the vast majority of the damage. Responding to this crisis will require deep changes to the structure and logic of the world economy, and existing incumbents are clearly unable to take the necessary steps.

This leaves us with a series of haunting questions: What will the 21st century look like? How will the story unfold? What will happen in the future and how might we shape it?

To answer these questions, we must come to grips with a key feature of the world economy—one that pundits in the global North tend either to ignore or wish away—namely, the fact that capitalist growth is fundamentally dependent on imperialism. This arrangement, which has persisted now for 500 years in various forms, is beginning to come under significant strain, and climate breakdown is likely to widen the cracks. This opens up opportunities for change, but also poses significant dangers. Everything depends on how governments and social movements choose to respond.

The key thing to grasp is that, under capitalism, “growth” is not about increasing production in order to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. To keep such a system going requires several interventions. First, you have to cheapen the prices of inputs (labor, land, materials, energy, suppliers, etc.) as much as possible, and maintain those prices at a low level. Second, you have to ensure a constantly increasing supply of those cheap inputs. And third, you need to establish control over captive markets that will absorb your output.

Growth along these lines cannot occur within an isolated system. If you place too much pressure on your domestic resource base or your domestic working class, sooner or later you are likely to face a revolution. To avoid such an outcome, capitalism always requires an “outside,” external to itself, where it can cheapen labor and nature with impunity and appropriate them on a vast scale; an outside where it can “externalize” social and ecological damages, where rebellions can be contained, and where it does not have to negotiate with local grievances or demands.

This is where the colonies come in. From the origins of capitalism in the late 15th century, growth in the “core” of the world economy (Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) has always depended on the sabotage of labor and resources in the “periphery”. Consider the silver plundered from the Andes, the sugar and cotton extracted from land appropriated from Indigenous Americans, the grain, rubber, gold and countless other resources appropriated from Asia and Africa, and the mass enslavement and indenture of African and Indigenous people—all of which exacted a staggering human and ecological toll. On top of this, colonizers destroyed local industries and self-sufficient economies wherever they went, in order to establish captive markets. There was no lag between the rise of capitalism and the imperial project. Imperialism was the mechanism of capitalist expansion.

As the Indian economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik put it, capitalist growth requires an imperial arrangement—not as a side gig but as a structurally necessary feature. Imperialism ensures that inputs remain cheap, and thus maintains the conditions for capital accumulation. But it also underpins the fragile inter-class truce that prevails in the core states. If you’re going to raise the real wages of the working classes in the core, or take steps to protect the local ecology, then in order to maintain capital accumulation you have to compensate for this by depressing the costs of labor and nature elsewhere, namely, among workers and producers in the global South. Ever since the rise of the labor movement in the late 19th century, capital’s concessions to the working classes in Europe and the United States have been possible in large part because of imperialism.

This arrangement came under strain in the middle of the 20th century, however, as radical anti-imperialist movements gained traction across the global South. After winning political independence, many Southern governments set about dismantling colonial systems of extraction. They protected their economies and supported their domestic producers using tariffs, subsidies and capital controls; they instituted land reforms; they nationalized key resources and industries; they rolled out public services and improved workers’ wages. This movement was successful in advancing economic sovereignty and improving human development across much of the South. But it also constrained the core’s access to cheap labor and nature, and reduced their control over Southern markets.