Episode 185 – Please Look Up with Jason Hickel

Macro N Cheese – Episode 185
Please Look Up with Jason Hickel
August 13, 2022

 

[00:00:04.950] – Jason Hickel [intro/music]

If you look at the IPCC report that came out earlier this year, they point out that with existing government policies, we’re headed for global warming of 3.2 degrees. That violates both of the targets of the Paris Agreement. And we know from existing research that 3.2 degrees is not compatible with organized civilization as we know it.

[00:00:28.750] – Jason Hickel [intro/music]

Rich countries are responsible for the vast majority of excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown. They have extremely high levels of energy use, well in excess of what’s required to meet human needs. They are the ones that need to decarbonize faster than the rest of the world.

[00:01:35.110] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is a return guest, a guest that I seem to find everything this gentleman says it just resonates with me. His name is Jason Hickel, and Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist. His research focuses on ecological economics, global inequality, imperialism, and political economy.

He is known for his books “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions” and “Less Is More: How De-Growth Will Save the World”. I’ve read both. They’re fantastic. Please get them. And I think we even have them in our own RP bookshelf. If you come to the website www.realprogressives.org, you will find the bookshelf and you will find Jason’s works, and I am delighted to have him joining me today. Jason Hickel, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:36.760] – Jason Hickel

Thanks very much. It’s good to be back with you.

[00:02:39.130] – Grumbine

Absolutely. And you’ve got a huge following. I can’t even imagine what managing your email account must be like. It’s amazing how popular you are, and it’s with good cause because we’re in really tough times both economically and environmentally, and your work couldn’t be more important right now. So I appreciate you taking the time to be with me. That fact is not lost.

[00:03:05.770] – Hickel

Yes, it’s my pleasure. I appreciate the show. So I’m glad to be back with you.

[00:03:09.500] – Grumbine

Fantastic. So when I proposed to do this interview, I’d read your books. And they’re fantastic, and we can touch on those if you’d like, because they all pertain to the subject we’re about to address. But in particular, there is an article that I think pretty much anybody can get their hands on, and it’s a relatively short read, but I think it’s important.

It was in Current Affairs back in November of 2021, and it was titled “What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency?” And a lot of the conclusions that you come to in this and throughout other work that you’ve done lead us back to a socialism which speaks to my heart. And there’s just no energy being put toward this at the state level.

And even the things that are passed off as progress are minimal. And I know that people get stated with this. They feel like they’ve had a big meal and they’re happy now that they passed the bill. But if it’s not enough, it’s not enough. This is survival. This isn’t a matter of, well, we did something. You wrote this great paper about what it would look like if we actually treat it like an emergency. I guess I want to talk to you about that. What would it look like today if we treated climate crisis like an emergency?

[00:04:30.250] – Hickel

Yeah. So one thing I do want to point out here is that there’s this bizarre discourse out there that the problem with the world right now when it comes to facing climate change is that there’s a lack of action, like a lack of necessary policy, et cetera. But in reality, there’s not a lack of action. This is exactly what climate policy action under capitalism looks like.

Systematic denial, continued investment in fossil fuel expansion, et cetera, et cetera. What we’re seeing here is the systematic failure of the capitalist political economy and the capitalist class to deal with this problem. I think we have to face up to that fact. This is not just about ignorance. It’s not that we just need more science. I mean, the science is important and this is what I focus on too.

But ultimately, what we’re seeing is the failure of a system to handle this problem. And so you get these crazy solutions, like you mentioned earlier in our discussion, solar geoengineering, which look, it’s got significant risks. Even if it did work, even if it didn’t have the kinds of risks that scientists are so worried about, it doesn’t actually deal with anything fundamental about the problem in the sense that: we continue emitting carbon, so we deal with the temperature problem by blocking out the sun a little bit, but we’re still building up carbon in the atmosphere, which is still causing ocean acidification.

The capitalist system is still in place, still pursuing perpetual corporate expansion and economic growth for the sake of capital accumulation, which continues to use more resources and more energy use, which also has impacts on ecosystems and other dimensions. Right? We’re overshooting several planetary boundaries, not just the boundary on cumulative emissions.

So these solutions like solar geoengineering emerge from a bizarre technocratic mindset that thinks we have to maintain the existing economic system at all costs and somehow try to fit the planet around that. This is not going to get us anywhere. What’s required is a deeper systematic transformation and this is something that capital cannot abide. And we’re seeing the effects of that.

[00:06:24.370] – Grumbine

It’s such an important point because for me, as someone who is a staunch lefty, I’m not a scientist. I wish I had a deeper understanding. I don’t. And that’s why I look at guys like you who really invest yourselves in this, so that I can get my arms wrapped around it. I just simply don’t have the skill to be able to deflect false narratives. They sound good on the surface. You’re right.

People tend to want to hold on to this capitalist approach to markets, to solutioning, financing big climate business as opposed to actually doing the work that it takes. We’ve got two problems. We’ve got not only the current emissions that were pumping into the atmosphere, but we also have to claw back the cumulative effects of however long we’ve been doing it to begin with.

So we’ve got two battles, not just ending fossil fuels, but we actually have to claw back what we’ve put out there. I don’t see that happening in a capitalist system either. How would a different system look that might address this?

[00:07:28.450] – Hickel

So in the Current Affairs article that you mentioned – and this, by the way, came in the wake of the last COP conference, the one in Glasgow. There was media coverage trying to suggest that the COP conference was a success of some kind, but it was really not. If you look at the IPCC report that came out earlier this year, they point out that with existing government policies, we’re headed for global warming of 3.2 degrees.

That violates both of the targets in the Paris Agreement. And we know from existing research that 3.2 degrees is not compatible with organized civilization as we know it. The status quo is not just a failure, it’s a death march. Our governments are failing us and failing all of life on Earth, and we have to face up to that. So my article was exploring if we were agreed to treat this crisis as an emergency that it is, then what would our policy look like?

And I think that the single most important intervention is also the most obvious, which is to cut fossil fuel use and scale it down on a binding, science-based schedule. It seems obvious because we know that fossil fuels are the biggest single contributor to global emissions, and yet not a single government has committed to do this. And that is remarkable.

Why is it that we’re not talking about capping and scaling down the fossil fuel industry? Our targets have to do with emissions, which is the effect of fossil fuel burning, but not fossil fuels itself. And that’s a problem because it leads to all of this fudging – maybe we can rely on technology in the future that doesn’t exist yet. John Kerry explicitly said this when asked about his climate goals.

Our emissions reductions, he said, are going to come from technology that doesn’t yet exist. [laughter] This is not a safe way to approach this crisis. So we need to cap and scale down fossil fuel use. This needs to be done on a variable schedule depending on the country. We have to take account of equity and justice principles. Rich countries are responsible for the vast majority of excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown.

They have extremely high levels of energy use well in excess of what’s required to meet human needs. They are the ones that need to decarbonise faster than the rest of the world. So when we talk about zero by 2050 that is a global average target. Rich countries need to decarbonize much faster than that. And it’s apparent to me that the only way to achieve that goal is to begin by nationalizing the fossil fuel industry and the energy companies, bringing them under public control just like any other essential service or utility.

And I see this as important for several reasons. First, because it allows us to wind down fossil fuel production and use without having to constantly fight fossil capital and their propaganda and their grip on our politicians and the media et cetera. They’re a dangerous foe and we need to treat them as such and we can assist that effort by bringing them under public control, democratic public control.

It also allows us to more quickly scale up renewable production if we have control over energy companies and it allows us furthermore to manage energy prices to protect against the kind of price chaos and profiteering that we’re seeing right now and make sure that energy is rationed in a way that protects working class communities and working class needs – the needs of ordinary people – and protects essential services, which is not happening right now.

In fact we’re seeing exactly how energy price crises get managed under capitalism which is chaos and anti-poor. So we need to be able to deal with that and I think public control is an essential step to that.

[00:10:49.990] – Grumbine

So when we talk about public control the value in the early stages of capitalism was speed to market. You have a real problem. Private sector conceivably has less red tape to cut through to get to the finish line to make a product. Now we’re dealing with profit motives and we’re dealing with capitalism that has had to redo itself over and over again killing the public purpose, eradicating shared ownership of the commons, and now it has nothing but us to eat any longer.

What makes government, which seems to be terribly inefficient as it runs today, which would stand as a barrier to nationalizing the fossil fuel industry I imagine. And also the profit motive itself drives what they do as opposed to the need of society. So how do you get past these networks of well-to-do people that don’t fear or care about what’s happening to the planet or to the people living on it or the ecosystem?

My view of this is quite cynical at this point. I’m not a doomer but I don’t see democratically run countries right now. I don’t believe almost anyone in the United States feels like democracy is alive and well and our vote matters and that we can do it. We see a lot of negative games being played that diminish the faith in the democratic process.

We’ve seen it done to Jeremy Corbyn, we’ve seen it done to Bernie Sanders. Things that have ripped apart people that have these forward-thinking ideas, put them in the back and put someone out front like a Donald Trump or Joe Biden that really are not seeing this in the existential way that we’re discussing in this chat. How do we overcome that?

[00:12:40.510] – Hickel

Yeah, well, there’s some critical strategy questions here, but I want to speak briefly to this question of democracy. I think it should be clear to everybody now that one of the weaknesses of democracy is that it’s very easy to hack and we need to be vigilant about that, right? It’s very easy to hack in terms of campaign finance, in terms of media controlled by oligarchs and corporations and so on.

And we presently don’t have the protections that would allow us to maintain a democratic public sphere. And that’s something that we have to build. But the other thing here is to recognize that capitalism itself is anti-democratic. And this is actually one of the core problems that we face. It’s anti-democratic in the sense that decisions over production, over what to produce, how to utilize labor and resources, and how to distribute the surplus that we collectively generate.

Those decisions are controlled by the 1% who own the majority of corporate shares and who elect the directors of firms. And what they do is they organize production not around meeting human needs or around ecological considerations, but around maximizing and accumulating corporate power and profits.

This is effectively what our antidemocratic economic system is organized to do. So until we recognize that this is how a capitalist economy functions, then I think that we’re a bit stuck. Because right now people have this idea in their heads that capitalism is just a generic market system. But it’s not a generic market system.

It’s a market system where decisions about production are controlled for particular kinds of purposes that I think most of us would object to if given the choice. So we need to shift to a more democratic mode of production. And that’s what I think something like democratic ecosocialism offers us. And this is the kind of movement we have to build. And I think pointing this out is actually quite crucial because the existing discourse we have among environmentalists is primarily that, look, we need to worry about individual responsibility and change our behavioral choices and so on.

And yes, of course that’s important. There’s no question about it. Individually we need to fly less and eat less beef, etc. But what’s actually necessary here is collective action on the scale that is sufficient to unseat existing incumbents or to otherwise force them to change course in a rather dramatic way. And to do that, we have to build the political power that can allow us to accomplish that.

And the environmentalist movement alone is actually not capable of doing that. It needs to build alliances with working class communities and with unions and organize around the core social objectives of an ecosocialist economy. Universal public services, a public job, guarantee, living wages, shorter working week, et cetera. To deal directly with the question of cost of living, deal directly with the question of livelihood, deal directly with the question of employment.

And then we have the freedom to think about what’s necessary to scale down less necessary forms of production – forms of production organized around corporate expansion and elite accumulation – so that we can focus resources, energy and labor instead around what is necessary for human wellbeing. That needs to be the objective and that’s an uphill battle.

That requires that we do the hard work of building a democratic ecosocialist movement. And I have to say, if I may, I’m going to disagree with one of my heroes here, Noam Chomsky, whom I admire and have admired for ages. He’s an extraordinary thinker. But he has recently come out several times saying that the climate crisis needs to be dealt with in such a timeframe that we don’t have time to transition to socialism.

Instead, we have to deal with this crisis within capitalism. And I understand the sentiments, the sense of urgency that he has, but the truth is that I don’t see a meaningful path to climate stability within capitalism. And I think that the quicker we are to realize that fact and start building the necessary political movements to achieve a just transition, the better off we’re going to be.

[00:16:31.450] – Grumbine

I like the way you said that. I spoke to Michael Albert, famed anarchist and friend of Noam as well, who spoke about how as much as he likes anarchy, and as staunchly in the anarchist camp as he is, he recognizes that anarchy cannot survive the timetable that we have to address climate crisis. And even he spoke to some need for a benevolent dictator that wasn’t quite the same as Noam saying capitalism.

But he definitely spoke to the need for an authoritarian approach to getting this done because of time, because of the dirty hands on nature that democracy gives us. It’s a necessary thing, but it’s also not clean and short and to the point. A lot of times democracy takes winding turns and requires education that we maybe don’t have time to provide.

I am interested because you have Noam who says what he said, and I agree with you, by the way. I just want to make that clear. And then Michael Albert is even further on the spectrum than Noam into the anarchist camp, making the claim that in order to address this, we actually have to have some sort of an authoritarian way of making this.

Central planning – he said, I don’t know how else to do it. Everything we talk about here is theoretical to some degree because we haven’t done it yet. What do you think an approach to addressing this through that democratic ecosocialist approach might look like?

[00:18:04.570] – Hickel

I think that we have to draw a distinction between authoritarianism and central planning. Yes, central planning in the past has quite often been authoritarian and top-down and in cases where it has been then it’s quite often also led to disaster. And I think that the reason central planning in the past has led to disaster is precisely because of authoritarian or anti democratic elements.

And so I’m really more on the side of Bookchin here, which is that the evidence that we have is pretty clear that when people have democratic control over production and over the allocation of resources and labor and surplus, then they tend to promote egalitarian outcomes, sustainable use of resources, they share with the future, they regenerate commons, et cetera, et cetera.

So the way I see it is that our existing system is problematic precisely because it’s antidemocratic and the antidote to this must be a radical democracy that is applied to the question of production and surplus distribution. And this is basically how I understand democratic ecosocialism to be. And I think that central planning can play an important role there and the planning can be democratic.

We frequently make plans in democratic fashion in our daily lives and we execute those plans collectively, etc. There’s nothing wrong with planning. Planning is good, especially when you’re facing an emergency. And I’m reminded actually of this bizarre exchange that I had with Ezra Klein. He said on his podcast something like: look, the case for degrowth ecosocialism is scientifically and empirically robust.

The problem is that it’s going to require planning. And he said this like it’s a bad thing. And the way I see it is, actually no. Planning is quite a good thing when you’re facing a crisis like this. We should have a plan. And the benefit here is that what we need to be able to do is: when we face a situation where we know we have to scale down excess resource and energy use quite urgently in order to achieve our climate objectives, then we need a plan to make sure that is not chaotic.

Capitalism is the king of chaos. Whenever there’s a reduction in aggregate production this causes recession and poverty and crisis and unemployment and misery and poverty, et cetera. What we want to call for here is a planned reduction, a targeted reduction of less necessary forms of production while organizing resources and labor around what is necessary to promote human well being. So again, universal public services, etc. And you need a plan for that.

[00:20:30.468] – Grumbine

Yes. [laughter]

[00:20:30.630] – Hickel

You need a way to direct production and that is effectively what democratic ecosocialism calls for. Now, we should point out also that there is a plan under capitalism, but the plan is a problem. The plan is basically all production should be organized by elites and for the interest of elites, regardless of what that means for people and planet. And that is a bad plan. So what we’re calling for is effectively: let’s change the plan and make it democratic and organized around human needs and ecological stability.

[00:21:01.870] – Grumbine

So the other question I have is you look at places like the United States where you’ve got a Republican Party who is actively censoring judges for behaving, quote unquote, as “woke”. And actively pushing forward a penalty, using its extreme wealth to penalize states or local areas that push back against the fossil fuel industry.

We’re dealing with huge money and massive power, well organized, and they’re just merely trying to prevent change. And that is typically what the left is up against in just about every social construct. How might we build a coalition that is able to take on that media apparatus? And they are so moneyed and quite frankly, well trained.

[00:21:56.010] – Hickel

Yeah, I think that the key here is organizing. And it’s funny because that sounds like a silly and banal word to say in the face of that kind of power. But the reason it sounds silly and banal is because we don’t. We – as in my generation and those who have been around over the past 30, 40 years – don’t have experience organizing, is the reality. Most people, right?

Because the big mechanisms of grassroots political organizing have been dismantled effectively by neoliberal reforms. And that’s everything from the anticolonial movements, which were destroyed by structural adjustments, to the labor unions, which were destroyed by Thatcher and Reagan, et cetera. And so we need to rebuild those skills.

And of course, there are examples of community organizing going on right now and have been for the past 40 years. And we need to be able to take advice from that, build on their insights, etc. But organizing is going to be absolutely key here. Transform your local progressive or socialist parties in an ecosocialist direction or otherwise work to build a new ecosocialist party.

And I think that’s going to be essential. And again, I think that the unions will be critical here. The unions have a form of power – that being the strike, the ability to withdraw labor – that environmentalists don’t have. But this is going to require a shift in unions. Because right now, unfortunately, in many unions, not all, there’s an assumption that the best way to deal with working class needs – that being for better livelihoods and employment, et cetera – is through growth.

And this is effectively a concession to the capitalist class. The concession is basically we will support you in expanding corporate power and elite accumulation, so long as in return we have decent levels of employment and some decent wages, etc. And in a situation where growth for high income nations is a problem, shift to a postgrowth ecosocialist economy then we need a shift in union tactics, which is simply to say, instead of seeing growth as the solution here, we need to target our social demands directly.

We need to directly demand living wage policy, a job guarantee, universal public services, the core things that will solve the question of livelihoods and unemployment permanently. I’m not about this idea that we should incrementally deal with these problems that can be solved now and permanently. And we should do that. And it’s wild to me that this is not already part of union discourse.

A public job guarantee as advocated by MMT would be single-handedly the most powerful way to increase the labor share of national income. Single-handedly the most powerful way to ensure universal livelihoods for all. Why is this not on the agenda? So I recommend climate activists get involved in unions who advocate for this to be a core policy for unions to work with, and to demand and build the kind of alliances and capacity that can be called upon for the kinds of strikes that would be necessary to force the just transition that we need.

[00:24:49.450] – Grumbine

I spoke with a gentleman named Joe Burns who is one of the key labor lawyers that works with Sara Nelson and the airline union. And he wrote a book recently called “Class Struggle Unionism”. And they’re talking about going beyond the single union floor and branching out and connecting unions and connecting struggles of other groups.

And it was invigorating to hear. And there was a recent conference in Chicago called Labor Notes where many unions got together. And they were in unison, invigorated and excited. They don’t have all the background in the economics that would make some of this stuff stick. They don’t have the full grasp of some of these larger political issues because they tend to focus on the workplace only.

But that’s changing. The US is way behind in some cases, as the rest of the world has maintained real hardcore protests that go on. It would be nice to see that in the US. Since we are the lead polluter and destroyer and exporter of neoliberalism, I think it would be fantastic to be able to see us rise up and knock that back. What is your take on this class struggle unionism?

I feel like this is key to us moving forward, to bringing about that kind of organized battle back against these very moneyed connected classes that control the media and everything else, quite frankly.

[00:26:18.070] – Hickel

Yeah, I think it’s absolutely essential. This is critical to the strategy that we need. Right now I think that unions tend to be – and this is again not true of all unions; there are some that I love and are teaching me things about this – but there’s a tendency to focus on narrow shop floor issues. And I understand the importance of that. I’ve been a member of unions for my entire life since I was 16, and I’ve benefited tremendously from that.

But we need to start thinking beyond the shop floor and connect unions across sectors, but also focus on demands that are important to the working class more broadly, including the unemployed. And this is where advocating for a job guarantee becomes really essential. In terms of inspiration, I think that we draw inspiration from two major social movements that changed the world in the 20th century.

One of them was the civil rights movement in the US and the other was the anticolonial movement across the global South. I have in mind actually specifically the way that it played out in South Africa, which is what I’m mostly familiar with. What’s interesting about both of these movements is that there was a united front between unions operating in this space as well as between community organizations.

And so in South Africa this is referred to as community unionism. The idea that we need to be able to mobilize the working class around issues that are not just about the shop floor but also about, in this case, anti-imperialist policy or racial justice or civil rights or whatever it might be. And these became extremely powerful movements. I think that this is where we draw our lessons.

That’s the kind of mass-scale mobilization that we need. And I cannot emphasize enough to your listeners that this does not happen on its own. If you read the history of the civil rights struggle, if you read the history of the anti-colonial movement, this takes concerted effort, concerted work, concerted alliance building, concerted strategy and I don’t see that happening right now on the scale that it needs to be happening. And that is again the kind of movement we need to build as quickly as possible.

[00:28:21.470] – Intermission

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[00:29:12.570] – Grumbine

What are some examples today of groups that are organizing that maybe groups like my own and others can hook up with and really help magnify?

[00:29:24.210] – Hickel

Yeah, it’s interesting. In terms of groups, I don’t know. There are examples of this kind of politics emerging, I think. If you look at the Minister for Consumer Affairs in Spain, he is explicitly ecosocialist and promoting ecosocialist policies. So he’s interesting to pay attention to. There’s the President of Ireland, who’s also interesting. He also focuses on ecosocialism and for rich countries, degrowth for the rich.

So there are examples of this. I think that Caroline Lucas in the UK is an interesting example of ecosocialist politics. The Young Greens in the UK recently endorsed ecosocialism as central to their platform. So you’re seeing this kind of politics bubble up and build. I think that it’s prevalent also in DSA, although we might want to see some more progressive takes in that direction.

But then, of course, you also have the big grassroots climate movements like the Sunrise Movement, Fight for the Future, Extinction Rebellion. They may not use terms like ecosocialism or degrowth, et cetera in their public facing materials, but they’re influenced in the ecosocialist directions. These are ideas that they advance.

So I’m no political strategist, but I think that we can see instances of this happening now. And I think it’s a matter of joining up these movements. And again, I won’t stop emphasizing the importance of connecting them to working class struggles and community struggles.

[00:30:44.550] – Grumbine

I think that’s well stated. I know that when we talked last time, in your book The Divide, you really go to great lengths of explaining the exploitation of the Global South and show the undemocratic neoliberal institutions that serve to extend an olive branch of capitalism into the Global South. And the giant sucking sound is the Global North extracting wealth from the Global South.

I don’t think people realize quite to the scale at which that’s occurring. So when we talk about this, for someone that’s not initiated, it may sound like it’s just simply bashing the rich elite North. I don’t think they really understand that dynamic. And it may seem remedial, but I think it bears mentioning. Explain what the strategy of the Global North is with the Global South and how that plays out.

[00:31:40.120] – Hickel

So I think to understand this, you have to understand a little bit about 20th century history. And the key is this: we know that the colonial economy was deeply extractive. We know that it appropriated extraordinary quantities of land-based goods and embodied labor from the South, causing misery everywhere it went. It effectively de-developed the South.

Now, in the middle of the 20th century there was a successful effort by anticolonial movements across the South to overthrow their colonizers. And in the wake of that, they established progressive, in most cases democratic governments that sought to introduce various shades of what we might call, I guess, socialist economic policy.

The idea was to overturn the extractive dimensions of the economy, to use industrial policy and sovereign development strategy to build productive capacity to meet local human needs. By the way, this was effective at improving the conditions of people across the global South. The consequence of this, however, was that it cut off the West’s supply of cheap labor and cheap raw materials that capitalism had relied on for accumulation for the past several hundred years. Western powers were none too pleased by this. Effectively, it caused an inflationary environment for the west.

[00:32:58.790] – Hickel

This is important to understand. When you have an increase in consumption in the Global South, then it’s intrinsically inflationary for the rich countries and the core of the world system. It makes it more difficult for them to achieve capital accumulation. So they faced a choice. This is in the 1970s. Either we accept the new anticolonial order and accept global justice and higher prices from the South and also accept the higher wages in the Global North that have resulted from the power of the union movement at that time, etc, etc.

And abandon capital accumulation as an objective, therefore shifting to a socialist economy. Or we maintain capital accumulation as the core objective and do everything we can to sabotage the gains of the working class in the north and sabotage the gains of the anticolonial movement in the South. And they did both, hardcore, but even more vigorously in the South with the imposition of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s which actively reversed all of the progressive reforms that had been introduced by Global South governments.

This was a catastrophe for Global South economies. The upshot is that it created a context that restored the old imperialist drain arrangements. The way it did this was by effectively depressing again the costs of labor and resources in the South. And when the cost of labor and resources in the South is cheap, then through international trade, an unequal exchange occurs because for every unit of embodied labor and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units of embodied labor and resources to pay for it.

And the consequence is a net outflow from Global South to Global North. And over the past several years my colleagues and I have quantified the scale of this outflow, and it’s huge. We can look at it in physical terms, which is probably the most interesting way to see it. Let me just give you a few of the figures that we have found. Every year there is a net flow from South to north of 822,000,000 hectares of embodied lands. So, let’s think about that for a second.

That’s twice the size of India. That quantity of land could be used to grow nutritious food for people in the Global South and yet is instead mobilized to service the needs of multinational companies for things like sugar for Coca Cola and cotton for Gap, et cetera, ultimately getting consumed in the Global North. So this drain of resources and productive capacity from the Global South has a double effect. It deprives the South of resources and productive capacities necessary to meet their own human needs.

And it means that the ecological damages of Northern growth and consumption which relies on this appropriation are offshored to the Global South. That’s where the damage happens in poor countries: at the resource frontiers. So the damage from American economic growth, you won’t see in Montana. You’ll see it in Indonesia and you’ll see it in Brazil, and you’ll see it in the Congo.

That’s where the damage is inflicted. And so this is what we referred to as ecological debt or ecological injustice on a global scale. And it’s a deeply destructive system. And we basically have a global economy where growth and accumulation in the Global North depends on a net appropriation and drain from the Global South through unequal exchange, which is an effect basically, of the outsized geopolitical and commercial power of northern firms.

So this needs to be addressed as part of any ecosocialist transition. An ecosocialist transition that is not also anti-imperialist, not also organized around global justice, is not an ecosocialism worth having.

[00:36:41.730] – Grumbine

Very well stated. I really appreciate that. It’s interesting because the thing that MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory, brings here is an understanding that money is a creature of the state and that as the state manages degrowth, it has the ability to mitigate the more deleterious effects it would have on people. And unfortunately, with an understanding of what you just stated, many people aren’t going to realize that there’s an alternative.

People I talk to, even people who are sympathetic to what I’m saying, tend to fall back to “this is the way it is”. This is what you got. But when you think about the fact that the government can marshal whatever resources it needs and has the ability to not only legislate but regulate and improve the lives of regular people, it’s not really regular people that are going to be impacted as much by this approach. More so than it would be the wealthy.

[00:37:38.610] – Hickel

Yes, that’s right.

[00:37:39.910] – Grumbine

The average person would be very happy to be less stressed out. And neoliberalism creates mental disorders. It creates that alienation and the scarcity narratives that are there for regular things, for things that we need as opposed to the luxury items that really drive this kind of behavior. People just can’t see the potential because it’s so oppressive. How do we inspire people? How do we make them believe and get them into action?

[00:38:08.370] – Hickel

Yeah, that’s interesting. What inspires me, I suppose, is simply the very clear evidence of two important things. First of all is that all of the core social policies that we propose so everything from universal public services to public job guarantee to living wages to wealth taxes, et cetera, these are extremely popular.

A large majority of people in high income countries support this kind of policy because it is sensible and because it is very clear it would improve people’s lives. And they support, furthermore, the idea of a government that focuses policy on human wellbeing and ecological stability rather than on growth. So these ideas are popular.

The reason they don’t come into our political discourse is simply because we don’t have a democratic political space really, in which they can be discussed at a mainstream level because of the issues you raised before. So I think that emphasizing that our current economic system is one where huge numbers of people live in misery. Now, first of all, we have to remember that the majority of that misery is suffered in the Global South.

[00:39:10.450] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:39:10.450] – Hickel

This is where the exploitation is occurring. This is the effect of our capitalist world economy. It’s not that poverty is some kind of accident or some kind of natural feature of the world. It is the symptom of the disease. But of course, also, even in rich countries in the USA where something like 40% of people can’t afford health care, a huge proportion of people live in substandard housing.

A lot of people can’t access nutritious food. This is wild. What is wrong with a system where we have a simultaneous overuse of resources, a massive overuse of resources like way in excess of what is necessary to meet human needs at a high standard and at the same time failed to meet basic human needs for food, for transit, for health care, etc. Think about that.

That’s an extraordinary failure of an economy. And there’s no question in my mind that a transition to an ecosocialist economy would reverse that would allow us to meet human needs at a higher standard, ending economic insecurity and all of the anxiety that comes along with that, while at the same time, using fewer resources and less energy, we have the data to demonstrate that this is possible to achieve. So again, it’s just about building the movements that are necessary to get us there.

[00:40:22.950] – Grumbine

With your anthropology background, Ayn Rand has had a huge impact on the course of events in this world. You’ve got guys like Jordan Peterson that preach the supremacy of self, the individual, and the right wing libertarianism. “I’m not responsible to anyone but my own interests.” I’d hoped to see that go away, but instead, in many ways, with this crypto movement, it really exacerbates self-seeking versus collective solutions. What is your take on that?

[00:41:00.450] – Hickel

Yeah, I think that’s true. [laughs] It strikes me that what’s odd about capitalist civilization is it doesn’t really cohere into a civilization as such. There’s very little sense of collective vision for the future, or a sense that the future could really, in some meaningful sense, be different and better, that we could actually address major problems that we face.

There’s really a kind of nihilism about this. How is that possible? That we have so abandoned any concept of collective action, collective effort to address common problems that we feel somehow prisoner to the institutions that we’ve created ourselves, to the ideologies that we created ourselves? How bizarre. So I think it’s a real problem.

And I dream of a day when we can transcend that and I think behave as the better angels of our nature would encourage us to, which is to cooperate. We know that this is intrinsic to what humans actually want to do and what we actually do in our real lives, together with our friends and our family, etc. We cooperate, we make plans, we address collective problems.

My colleague David Graeber was fond of saying that people are actually all socialists in their private lives, right? [laughter] If you’re hanging out with your friend, trying to do some projects, and your friend asks you to hand the hammer over, then there’s no way you would say “well, what’s in it for me, mate?” [laughter] It’s crazy.

We’re all capable of behaving this way. We all behave this way in our everyday lives. Why is it that our political ideology somehow denies that as even a possibility and rejects that as a politics? It’s very strange.

[00:42:36.990] – Grumbine

I find one of the difficult things, especially the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. But the more you learn, you also realize how distinctly different what you thought the people you elected to office were versus what they are when they’re in office. And I’ve never been a politician. I’m an activist.

And so I realized that a lot of people think, and I’ll just use the United States as an example: they see the Democratic Party and they say the things that you want to hear, and then the outcome of it is always a rotating villain that blocks it. The only time I have ever seen the Democratic Party in the United States get together and fight hard was to block Bernie Sanders.

I’ve never seen them use the skills that they had to block Bernie in addressing climate crisis or addressing labor or addressing any of these things. And so the Democratic Party is like steroids for fascism. It breeds fascists because people believe in it, because you said this rhetoric, but only to find out after you get in there that you’re not really going to fight for it.

You don’t really believe it because you’re neoliberal as well, and your goal is to protect capital. And I think this revolving door of going into private sector – Wall Street – and the corruption that is so prevalent, not just in the US. It’s global. There’s corruption everywhere. The Panama Papers prove that. How do you reverse that in people’s minds?

There’s an almost cult-like “vote blue no matter who” mindset that blocks cognition. And I understand the other guys are really awful. They’re always really awful. Next election will be the most existentially critical election to vote blue, no matter who, and yet they don’t deliver. And I really do believe that a lot of what you said about why we don’t do collective action stems from thinking they did collective action by putting Barack Obama into office, by getting Joe Biden in office, and then having them not deliver and not be voracious fighters for the cause.

I think that it takes a lot of people out of the game. They see that and they say, I don’t have a champion who’s going to help me. They’re not doing it. I better live my best life. And then now you’ve created a new libertarian at least that’s what I see. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:45:00.520] – Hickel

Yeah, it’s clear to me that this breeds the most extraordinary cynicism, which is very depressing. When I look back on the Obama campaign, the way that he was so successfully able to mobilize people around hope, around change, and people believed in that.

[00:45:17.560] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:45:18.190] – Hickel

There was a real palpable sense that something fundamental is about to change and we will have a different and better economy and society. People believed that was possible and they voted accordingly. But then the absolute not just failure to deliver, but refusal to act on any of the core demands of the kinds of people that brought him into power.

And then once he was out of office, one of his first acts was hanging out with Richard Branson on his private island. This is going to destroy people’s sense of political participation. It really leaves you with a sense that there is no hope within the existing two party system, and then that cynicism is then manipulated – every election that comes by – by the Dems saying, “okay, we may not be great, but at least we’re better than the Republicans who are crazy.”

And they just keep stumbling from election to election that way. And it’s just the most absurd politics. And I think that I’m depressed with it, I assume that millions of other people are, too.

[00:46:13.230] – Grumbine

You’re in the company of someone.

[00:46:15.330] – Hickel

And so we have to be able to build alternatives to that. But you’re right. Watching the way they destroyed Bernie Sanders, who he wasn’t even really radical. He’s basically a centrist by European standards.

[00:46:25.780] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:46:27.750] – Hickel

It does make you worry.

[00:46:30.270] – Grumbine

Bernie starts out our podcast. That’s what we need. And then my good friend Joe Biden. Joe Biden, he’s got a 50 year track record of doing absolutely everything we don’t want. He’s showing you who he is, believe him. He’s got an opportunity right now to eradicate student debt from millions of people who have subsidized the training, education and development of corporations around the world.

[00:46:57.230] – Hickel

That’s right.

[00:46:58.350] – Grumbine

The one thing he doesn’t even need Congress to do anything about. And there’s always some sycophant that is telling you you’re being divisive. And I’m saying, “no, I want to survive.” The debt burden is enough to make people do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. And I can show you proof of that in the state of Pennsylvania where I live, where the state of Pennsylvania funds certain public works through fracking dollars because they cut the bottom out of taxation that would have served the public purpose here in the state.

And states being currency users, they are dependent on that. And instead of making it so that it’s a local survivable community, they have instead invested in fracking. It’s extraordinarily depressing to make the case, to show this, to explain it. It just goes by like it’s nothing because: “vote blue.” Every bit of this is so serious. It’s got real consequences to not taking action.

[00:48:00.210] – Hickel

Absolutely. Look at what’s going to be happening in the US and the UK coming up. The response to inflation and the cost of living crisis. Like the plan is basically to induce a recession and cut wages and employment. That’s the way it intends to solve this crisis. It’s such an extraordinary failure of imagination. This is how capitalism seeks to deal with the crisis of low growth. It is deeply destructive. And there’s a much easier way to deal with inflation and the cost of living. And MMT actually has the answer.

[00:48:34.650] – Grumbine

Yes!

[00:48:35.580] – Hickel

Because the key here – and I’m sure that’s something you repeat with your listeners all the time – but to me it’s so inspiring because the key here is: what matters about inflation? For the majority of people, what inflation means is that essential goods are too expensive. And by essential goods we mean things like food and housing and energy and water and transportation, et cetera, et cetera.

What MMT allows us to do is by issuing currency to directly fund public production of universal public services you directly reduce the cost of living. Directly, immediately. It is deflationary in the most important way. And I see this as absolutely essential to solving several crises that we face right now. It solves the cost of living crisis, but also by permanently solving the question of unemployment and livelihoods, it also opens up a space where we can talk rationally for the first time about what is necessary to do in the rest of the economy.

Scaling down less necessary forms of production to achieve our climate objectives and our ecological objectives. And furthermore, scaling down less necessary forms of production reduces energy demand and therefore limits our exposure to supply crunches when it comes to energy which is a major driver of inflation right now.

So heterodox economics in the form of MMT and post-growth thinking and so on offers direct and feasible solutions to the very crises that we face right now. It’s just that the problem is that these kinds of solutions run against the interests of capital. The reason that universal public services – which would be so easy to achieve – and a public job guarantee – which would be so easy to achieve – are rejected is because what this does is it eliminates the artificial scarcity of employment and access to essential goods that capitalist growth thrives on.

Capitalism needs to perpetually produce an artificial scarcity regardless of how much aggregate production the system generates. It has to maintain an artificial scarcity of what people need most so as to ensure that there’s a steady supply of cheap labor for capitalist production and accumulation. That’s a problem we need to solve ultimately and we have the tools to do it.

[00:50:45.330] – Grumbine

You bringing up inflation was an important thing. You saw people during the pandemic receive pay for not working and have less expenses because they weren’t commuting back and forth to work which showed us that we can survive without all that traffic as well. However, by giving people money and freedom and access to services like vaccinations, although it was poorly done, people had choices and freedom and some people chose not to participate in the capitalist system, to not work in these jobs.

And so capital in my opinion, said, wait a minute, we’re going to claw back those gains. You guys have a little bit too much power to say no to us right now. We need to cut it up, and we’re going to take it by raising prices, making the gains you had irrelevant, and in fact make them negative. We’re going to claw it back.

The Fed, acting in concert with other institutions, is raising interest rates to once again funnel money to the people who already have money, while making that money come from the people that gained a few pennies during the pandemic. You’re back to negative. Capital wins again. There are companies gouging at 900% profit. My take on this inflation is the vig, if you will, on allowing people to survive a pandemic. Just me speculating, but I believe that. What are your thoughts?

[00:52:17.670] – Hickel

I think that’s a brilliant description of the problem. And it seems to me that in the face of a crisis like this, again, it’s just like the 1970s. There’s a choice that our society faces. Either we seek to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation by sabotaging the working class, to discipline labor through the mechanisms that Larry Summers, et cetera, are pushing for, or we abandon capital accumulation as an objective and transition to a post-capitalist economy.

That’s the choice we face, and I hope deeply that we will choose the latter. But I don’t see this coming voluntarily from the capitalist class. I think that we need to abandon the idea that the 1% are going to voluntarily take the necessary steps to deal with social problems and to deal with ecological problems. I think that the quicker we realize that’s not going to happen, the better.

[00:53:07.170] – Grumbine

Jason, you are truly a man that speaks the things that I feel in my heart, and this stuff is real to me. I think a lot of us feel these things, and it’s a heavy burden to feel powerless. And a gentleman like you, I’m happy to be able to talk to you. I’m very sad, though, because there’s not much one person can do. It does take all of us, the organizing that we talked about earlier in this discussion. What is your hope for tomorrow? What are some of the things you think you’re going to be working on that will help facilitate that transition?

[00:53:44.670] – Hickel

In terms of research, what’s interesting is that there’s a really exciting community of people who are working on these questions in terms of the research, and there are interesting things planned for the coming years, including new ways to model post-growth pathways and possibilities both for climate mitigation as well as for solving social problems.

I think that that will hopefully have a big impact on what is thinkable for people, for policymakers, and for scientists and students and for the public discussion. So that’s exciting. But in terms of hope, I get that question a lot, and the way I’ve come to answer it is simply by saying that our hope can only ever be as strong as our struggle.

And so we have to build the struggle that is capable of delivering on the future that we want to see and what we know we need. And without that effort, without that struggle, then we can’t have hope out of nowhere. And so if we want that, if we want to feel hopeful about the future, then we need to build the political capacity to bring that future into being.

[00:54:39.450] – Grumbine

Well stated, Jason, thank you so much for joining me today. This was absolutely fantastic. I’m so happy you were willing to come back on. It really makes me feel good because we’re trying to do good work here. And I feel like putting your voice out there is a real contribution to that. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:54:57.100] – Hickel

Yeah, thank you. And I’m a fan of the podcast, and I’m very grateful that you’re putting out such interesting ideas. So keep it up.

[00:55:04.590] – Grumbine

Thank you so much. All right. This is Steve Grumbine with Jason Hickel with Macro N Cheese. We’re outta here!

[00:55:16.690] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.