Jason Hickel
@jasonhickel
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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
Joined September 2011
Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2023, on climate change, capitalism, colonialism, degrowth and post-capitalist futures. As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵.
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I had to read this sentence twice. Just pure evil.
Israeli forces allowed aid into northern Gaza for the first time in over a month – and then set fire to the shelters where the aid was delivered.
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People often assume that capitalism is defined by "markets and trade". But markets and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism is only 500 years old. So what is distinctive about this economic system? Three things (well, more, but three for now):.
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In his UN speech Netanyahu claimed there are rockets in every civilian home in Lebanon, effectively arguing all homes are a military target. This is 100% genocidal and this maniac must be stopped.
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Environmentalism without class struggle is using paper straws while the rich take 9 minute flights in their private jets.
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The problem is not simply that capitalism produces too much, but that it produces the wrong stuff: SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence instead of public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare. It overuses resources and still fails to meet even basic needs.
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The World Bank is upset that Bhutan's old-growth forests are just standing there, doing nothing, when they could be turned into Ikea furniture.
71% of #Bhutan's territory is covered in forest, but with a contribution of only about 2% to GDP per year, the forest sector remains underutilized. How can the country sustainably invest in its forests?
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Crazy how the punishment is a fine and not the immediate liquidation of the company and disbursement of all its assets as reparations to the workers and communities.
BREAKING: In a landmark victory for human rights, a US jury just found @Chiquita guilty of funding death squads in Colombia that were killing people near the company's banana farms. First time US courts hold major corporation accountable for human rts abuses abroad.👊🙏
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This is devastating news. Global South countries have been fighting for the right to manufacture and import affordable versions of the covid vaccines. A few hours ago, the USA, UK and European Union joined forces to block them at the WTO. The West is indefensible.
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All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point. Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and.
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"Green capitalism" means turning the global South into a giant sacrifice zone so rich folks in the US and Europe can drive electric SUVs.
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Reading accounts of how nurses’ fingers were blown and off and their faces and eyes destroyed when their pagers exploded. In hospitals. Just horrifically evil.
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So, Iran will be sanctioned for selling weapons to Russia, but the US and Europe can keep selling weapons to Israel while it conducts a genocide no problem. Got it. 👍.
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No, the British Empire didn't just "make mistakes", with a few massacres here and there. They committed genocide on several continents, produced famines that killed tens of millions of people, and led a human trafficking cartel for 200 years. The violence was systematic.
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No, the British Empire did not spontaneously "end slavery". Credit for that goes to several generations of slave revolts—including the successful Haitian Revolution of 1804—and sustained pressure from radical social movements pushing for abolition.
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I cannot get over the fact that now multiple reports have confirmed that Israeli forces are systematically using rape as a method of torture and there is zero outrage from Western media.
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BREAKING: Following a strong student mobilization, the University of Barcelona has passed a motion to end ties with Israel.
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The British Empire was one of the most violent institutions in modern history, built on explicitly racist ideology and guilty of serial crimes against humanity. It is astonishing that OBEs and other honours are given, accepted and celebrated in its name.
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At some point we'll have to face the fact that politely asking the ruling class to stop climate destruction is not going to work.
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BREAKING: The Lancet has just published this article "conservatively" estimating that the death toll in the Gaza genocide could be 186,000 people or more. That's 8% of the population, obliterated. These are apocalyptic figures.
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I’m actually astonished that other journalists have not lost it with Miller and called him out for his bullshit. We need more of this. The constant lying and dissembling is unbearable.
Heated moment in State briefing. @cosgrove_iv: This admin has financed a genocide in Gaza for the last year and every day you’re up there denying it. Miller: There’s plenty of places in Washington you can give a speech. Liam: People are sick of the bullshit here, it is a genocide
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35 years ago today, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was assassinated in a French-backed coup. He aspired to an egalitarian, feminist society, and an economy built on self-sufficiency, ecological regeneration, and independence from Western powers.
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The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not.
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This is huge. Jacinda Ardern's New Zealand is about to become the first major country to abandon growth as political priority in favour of well-being. #postgrowth
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Wow. Barcelona has declared a climate emergency that gets straight to the point: "The current economic model is based on endless growth, consumption & a permanent race for profit. This economic system threatens the ecological balance of our planet & has multiplied inequalities.".
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The tragedy in Pakistan is a stark reminder of climate injustice. The top map shows which nations are most responsible for excess emissions. The bottom map shows which nations are most impacted by it. Climate breakdown is playing out along colonial lines.
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We now have video footage alongside systematic evidence that Israeli soldiers gang rape Palestinian captives and there is zero outrage from Western media. I am loosing my mind.
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It's wild that an operation against military targets which killed zero people (one dying from falling shrapnel) has triggered more outrage from Western media than Israeli operations targeting residential areas and ambulances and massacring hundreds of civilians.
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People often claim that capitalism performed better than socialism in terms of poverty and human development in the 20th century. This story is repeated so frequently that no one ever even bothers to back it up. Is it true? 🧵.
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BREAKING: Barcelona has become the first European city to suspend all relations with Israel, "until a definitive ceasefire in Gaza is declared and the basic rights of the Palestinian people and compliance with United Nations resolutions are guaranteed.".
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No, the British Empire didn't just "make mistakes", with a few massacres here and there. They committed genocide on several continents, orchestrated famines that killed tens of millions of people, and led a human trafficking cartel for 200 years. The violence was systematic.
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The @guardian is calling the massacre "food aid-related deaths". I cannot believe what I am seeing.
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Life expectancy in China is now higher than in the United States, by 1.3 years, despite China having *83% less* GDP per capita.
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We are a depressed, lonely and alienated society because we live in an economic system that is organized around artificial scarcity, exploitation and extraction. It breaks us every day.
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You have to ask yourself: if our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people's basic needs, then what is actually the point?.
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On this day in 1953, the US and Britain orchestrated a brutal coup that deposed Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular Prime Minister of Iran, beloved for his progressive and pro-worker reforms, because he sought to restore national control over the country's oil reserves.
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The UN is reporting that Israeli forces have killed 88 UN aid workers, more than have ever been killed in any single conflict in history. 47 UN buildings, and more than 100 health facilities, have been hit by Israeli airstrikes.
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I will never forget how Zionists shifted so fast from vehemently denying the Nakba for 75 years to actively calling for a second Nakba, without skipping a beat. Genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing lies at the core of the Zionist project and all of them know it.
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1. First, and most importantly, it is defined by enclosure and artificial scarcity. The origins of capitalism lie in a systematic effort by elites to restrict people's access to commons and independent subsistence, in order to render them reliant on wage labour for survival.
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Something big happened this morning. David Attenborough, speaking on BBC radio, pointed to capitalism as the main driver of ecological breakdown. The debate is beginning to shift.
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The apartheid regime in South Africa did not fall because of moral pressure. It fell because of organized, multi-front resistance.
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CNN published a piece today about Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza. One bulldozer driver testifies that they drove over Palestinians, dead and alive, "in the hundreds". This is genocidal and just breathtakingly evil.
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BREAKING: 99 US physicians and medical professionals have published a letter and report indicating "probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza. is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.". This is genocide.
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Remember when Israeli forces insisted they would *never* be so heinous as to destroy a hospital, and then went on to destroy the entire healthcare infrastructure of Gaza.
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We are at a point where Israelis can slaughter civilians in Gaza and the West Bank with total impunity. This is worse than what we saw in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. The closest analogue is the European colonization of the Americas, where killing was done for sport and.
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The NYT headline "The Planet is Failing" is a masterclass in passive, apolitical framing. The planet is not spontaneously "failing", as if it's the planet's fault. It is actively being destroyed. And it is being destroyed by our economic system and those who run it.
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Global South countries, led by South Africa and India, have requested a suspension of the WTO's patent rules to enable them to manufacture or import affordable generic versions of the COVID-19 vaccine. Shockingly, Britain and other rich countries have refused.
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On this day in 1961, the US, Britain and Belgium assassinated Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Republic of Congo and inspiration to millions, because he sought to restore national control over the country's vast mineral reserves. Remember Lumumba.
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Palestinian babies are not spontaneously freezing to death. They are being deliberately subjected to conditions calculated to terminate life. In other words, they are being murdered. The cause of death is not the cold, but the genocide being perpetrated by Israel and the US.
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At some point we'll have to face the fact that politely asking the ruling class to stop climate destruction is not going to work.
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The top map shows which nations are most responsible for excess emissions. The bottom map shows which nations are most impacted by it. If we are not attentive to the colonial dimensions of climate breakdown, we are missing the point.
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People need to see this. Israel has perpetrated over 80% of the cross-border attacks with Lebanon during the past year. Hezbollah has shown remarkable restraint.
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If your economy requires people to produce and consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.
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The correct response to an apartheid regime is to ban weapons sales, remove from the olympics and FIFA, end institutional ties, boycott, divest, and sanctions.
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BREAKING: the director of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reports that the siege by Israeli forces has now killed everyone in the intensive care unit. “We are left with nothing, no power, no food, no water. With every passing minute, we are losing life.".
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The obsession of the capitalist class with "innovation" sits awkwardly alongside their insistence that "there is no alternative". We are allowed to imagine new gadgets but not a just economy.
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This image breaks me. At 2.7 degrees of warming, which is our present policy trajectory, two billion people will be exposed to extreme heat. 99.7% of those people live in the global South. People who have done nothing to cause this crisis. The injustice is staggering.
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On this day in 1954, the United States backed a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies.
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Israeli soldiers have confessed to using bulldozers to drive over hundreds of Palestinians at once, living and dead, on multiple occasions. The only way you can drive over masses of living people is if they are maimed or bound, and lined up for this purpose. Pure evil.
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This is remarkable: 170 Dutch academics put together a 5-point manifesto for economic change after the C19 crisis, building on #degrowth principles. It has gone viral in Dutch media. In this thread I'll summarize the points in English.
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The covid catastrophe that's engulfing India and other global South countries could have been significantly mitigated had the US, UK and Europe not repeatedly refused to suspend vaccine-related patents. People are being sacrificed on the altar of "intellectual property".
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Israel has now officially rejected the possibility of a Palestinian state. It also controls the external borders. This means 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are under full control of the Israeli entity but denied equal rights. That is apartheid.
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How come we get to call Russian billionaires “oligarchs” but for US and British ones we have to swallow “job creators”?.
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This month US Americans got a small glimpse of what a coup might feel like, and they are rightly outraged. One might hope this would provoke some reflection on the *actual* coups that the US itself has perpetrated around the world. Here are some of them:.
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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has just accused Israel of war crimes, including collective punishment, forcible evacuations, attacks on medical facilities and personnel, as well as violating the obligation of an occupying power to ensure access to basic necessities.
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This continues today, with attempts to ensure an artificial scarcity of access to essential goods such as housing, healthcare, education, transit, and so on - goods that could very easily be provided, at high quality, on a universal public basis.
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Over the past 500 years, this has taken the form of privatization of commons, forced dispossession, destruction of subsistence economies and - particularly in the colonies - taxing people in a currency they do not have in order to induce them to seek wages in that currency.
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I want to tell you a story about something fascinating that has happened in Japan. An academic named Kohei Saito wrote a book about democratic "degrowth communism". Everyone said it would be a flop, because degrowth "is a terrible word", and communism "is a terrible word too.".
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COVID-19 has forced capitalists to confront an inconvenient truth: that capital accumulation cannot happen without labour.
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Israel detonating thousands of bombs in Lebanon knowing that this will harm and kill children, civilians, medics and passersby going about their daily lives in markets and on the street is in fact an act of terrorism.
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What Israel and the US are perpetrating against the Palestinian people, with the support of much of the Western media, is straightforwardly the most evil thing I have ever witnessed in my life. It can never be forgotten or forgiven.
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The NYT headline reads "Surviving Gaza". as if Gaza is maiming people. Zero mention of Israel. I cannot express how obscene this is.
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2. Second, capitalism is organized around - and dependent on - perpetual expansion, meaning ever-increasing production of commodified goods. It is the only intrinsically expansionary economic system in history (meaning it basically has a crisis if it doesn't continually expand).
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"Poor countries are not 'under-developed', they are over-exploited.". —Michael Parenti.
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It’s amazing to see how Western media have suddenly rediscovered that torture is evil, after ignoring systematic torture, rape and murder in Israeli prisons for the past year.
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To sum up, Israel is conducting genocide in Gaza, ethnically cleansing the West Bank, and massacring civilians in Lebanon, all at the same time. The violence and chaos that the Zionist regime perpetrates is staggering in scale. It must be stopped and dismantled.
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This is devastating. New report shows that Israeli intelligence targets queer Palestinians in the West Bank to blackmail them into becoming informants.
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Crucially, under capitalism the purpose of increasing production is *not* primarily to meet human needs, but rather to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. (It is also the main objective of innovation).
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Western liberals do not care about women's liberation in the global South. Make no mistake, they would gladly use that image of the Iranian woman defying the dress code to justify invading Iran and proceeding to massacre and immiserate millions of women.
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Israel has just massacred five journalists in Gaza, burning them alive. This on the same day that reports emerge of Palestinian babies freezing to death in the refugee camps. Every day this regime charts new depths of barbarism.
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English tea. Italian coffee. Belgian chocolate. American iPhones. None of these statements are true. All of these products are produced overwhelmingly in the global South, with Southern resources, Southern land and Southern labour.
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If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.
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3. Finally, capitalism is notable for precluding democratic decision-making. Even in countries that prize political democracy, democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital.
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In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently.
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The only appropriate response to the climate catastrophe in Pakistan is to unconditionally cancel the country's external debts. These resources should be used to support people and ecosystems rather than to service foreign capital. It is a minimal first step toward reparations.
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It is wild how we can see Israeli forces massacring and shredding children every day, livestreamed on our screens, and then go over to the NYT, Guardian or BBC and find no mention of it whatsoever. Just a normal day for Western journalists.
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If you have ever wondered what colonization was like—the violence, the dispossession, the massacres, the genocide, the displacement, the famine, the dehumanization, the racism—you are watching it in real time. It is among the most depraved of all possible acts.
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Capitalism — and the capitalist growth imperative — is the root cause of climate breakdown.
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The Israeli occupation forces completely destroyed both Rafah Museum and Al Qarara Museum in the early weeks of the assault on Gaza, obliterating thousands of priceless artworks and artefacts. But tell me again about your rage over the Balfour painting.
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Where universal public goods do exist, these have usually been won by longstanding struggles by labour movements and other progressive forces (including the anti-colonial movement).
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The NYT intentionally avoids saying "Palestinian land".
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This introduces a constant pressure to depress real wages and attack environmental protections wherever possible (in the absence of countervailing political forces). The result is a system that, left to itself, automatically generates inequality and ecological breakdown.
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No, the British Empire did not "bring democracy" to their colonies in the global South. British rule was literally dictatorship. The colonized struggled and bled for the right to vote *in their own countries*.
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Biden is finished. I just don’t see how he survives this.
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It's important to distinguish here between small businesses, which quite often operate with a steady-state, use-value logic (and which obviously preceded capitalism), and corporations whose main objective is expansion and accumulation (which define the capitalist era).
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Yes:
Does anyone have that recent study that determined all 8 billion of us could be easily housed and fed with only 30% of the current global labor output and that our collective suffering is manufactured by capitalism. Because it altered my brain chemistry.
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For every $1 of aid the global South receives, they lose $14 through unequal exchange with the North. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.
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This is a headline from Save the Children today. The death and suffering that the Israeli regime has inflicted on Palestinians is monstrous beyond words.
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"It is possible to kill children legally". The moral emptiness of Western liberalism is summed up in these words.
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"Unskilled labour" is ultimately a propaganda term to justify paying people poverty wages.
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Biden removing Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list demonstrates once again that there was never any reason to have them on it in the first place. The sole objective was to strangle the Cuban economy and starve the Cuban people. Just pure evil.
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