Jason Hickel, Anthropologist: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism
December 30, 2024A liberated Palestine is a threat to global capitalism.
@transnationalinstitute
English Script:
Jason Hickel: A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces the crisis, and they will not let that happen. It’s funny, like I’m always asked to talk about ecology, when really what I want to talk about is capitalist imperialism. And the two are just are a piece of the same problem, right? The ecological crisis is ultimately playing out along colonial lines, right? We know that it is the countries of the Imperial core that are overwhelmingly responsible, and specifically their ruling classes who control the means of production and energy systems and investment, etc., etc., are overwhelmingly responsible for the excess emissions that are driving climate breakdown, right? We know that’s a fact. We also know it’s a fact that the Global South suffers the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown, right? The people who have contributed literally nothing to the crisis whatsoever, not contributed a small amount, contributed nothing, right? And it’s not just, of course, climate breakdown, we face. There’s also other dimensions of the ecological crisis. And here too, we see the same thing playing out when it comes to excess material use in the world economy. Overwhelmingly, it’s due to excess material use and accumulation in the imperial core. Half of the material used that’s used in the core is not appropriated from the periphery, from the territories of the global South, right? Which causes severe damage. You don’t see this damage in Sussex or in Finland. You see it in the Congo. You see it in Indonesia, right? You see in Bolivia, in the frontiers of extraction, the core benefits, and everyone else suffers
