Jason Hickel Describes Capitalism
The word capitalism tends to cause immediate confusion. For most people it calls to mind things like businesses, markets and trade: the ability of people to produce and sell things to one another. Who could possibly be against this? But in fact businesses, markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is a relatively recent system, having emerged in Western Europe only about 500 years ago. If one was to point to the single most important defining feature of this particular economic system, it would be that it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Let me clarify what I mean. Yes, many of us live in electoral systems where we select political leaders from time to time. We have something approximating political democracy, as corrupt and imperfect as it may be. But when it comes to the economy, thesystem of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy enters. Production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital, meaning large corporations, the major financial firms, and the 1% who own the lion’s share of investable assets. Capital determines what gets produced, how our labour and resources shall be used, and for whose benefit. And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet people’s needs, or to achieve social progress. The purpose is to maximize and accumulate profit – that is the overriding objective.
Capital seeks constantly increasing accumulation. To achieve this, it needs to cheapen the prices of inputs as much as possible (labour, land, energy, and materials), and maintain those prices at a low level. It also needs a constantly increasing supply of these inputs. This process cannot go on for very long within a bounded national economy. If you over-exploit your domestic working class, sooner or later you are going to face a revolution, or a crisis of overproduction. And if you over-exploit your domestic environment, eventually you will degrade the ecological base upon which all production relies.
To overcome these contradictions, 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 mass appropriation of labor and resources from the “periphery” (Latin America, Asia and Africa). There was no lag between the rise of capitalism and the imperial project. Capitalism has always required an imperial arrangement.
This was obvious during the first several hundred years of capitalist history, which I detail in this book. European colonizers went about destroying self-sufficient industries in the periphery and forcibly re-organizing production to serve consumption and accumulation in the core. Historians have documented that extraordinary quantities of value were siphoned out of the periphery and into the core, subjecting the former to deprivation, misery, and mass mortality while furnishing the latter with unprecedented wealth.
-- Jason Hickel, in the new preface to The Divide.
