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It is obviously easier to decimate the higher education sector after painting it as intolerant and partisan

what is at stake for the political right here is the opposite of freedom of expression. As draconian laws effectively criminalise political protest, the goal of the fake crisis is to foist retrograde and discredited ideologies like race science and climate denial upon universities which are among the few remaining spheres where knowledge is valued

Since universities also have a statutory obligation, alongside academic freedom, to uphold academic standards, repudiating specious thought is a scholarly duty, not cancel culture.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warned English universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety or face sanctions despite widespread concerns. My own university has adopted the IHRA document wholesale even as scores of its academics have warned that some of the examples it gives conflate criticism of the policies, constitutional doctrines and laws of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and will silence those who work or speak on the topic of Israel and Palestine

The sharpest end of governmental cancellation is reserved for those who assess Britain’s imperial past critically. Attempts to undo silences and amnesia around empire and slavery, or question mindless glorification are frequently met with enraged denunciations of “town hall militants”, “woke worthies” and “baying mobs”, to use Communities Minister Robert Jenrick’s epithets.

Heritage organisation National Trust has also come under attack. Its “Colonial Countryside” project which sought to modestly illuminate some colonial and slavery connections for properties in its care was met with political fury from Conservatives. A particular red rag was Winston Churchill’s family home, Chartwell, in relation to which his imperial connections, hardly a state secret, were mentioned.

Dowden’s warnings to heritage bodies to act in line with government policy or face funding cuts have rightly worried museum staff about political interference in the sector.

the extent to which the concocted free speech crisis is influenced by far-right forces in the United States and their culture war agenda. An exposé by Open Democracy last year found that the freedom of speech White Paper, not only cited Policy Exchange (complete with false claims) liberally but also the US-based Alliance for Democratic Freedom International (ADF), a Christian anti-equality organisation which has been classified as a “hate group”. This organisation has spent £410,000 ($542,000) on lobbying in the UK since 2017, also getting involved in campus disputes.

Behind the fabricated cultural battles and false flag “free speech” campaigns, a real battle is now unfolding, a fight to defend critical thought, robust scholarship, and the right to challenge the line that wealth and power would have us all acquiesce to.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South

Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.

Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002).

for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”.Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc.

Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).

Due to the growing fragmentation of international commodity chains, monetary databases on bilateral gross trade flows have been criticised for not accurately depicting the monetary interdependencies between national economies (Johnson and Noguera, 2012), i.e., the amount of a countries’ value added that is induced by foreign final demand and international trade relations. Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators Johnson and Noguera, 2012, Timmer et al., 2014 are designed to take into account the complexity of the global economy. The TiVA concept is motivated by the fact that, in monetary terms, trade in intermediates accounts for approximately two-thirds of international trade. Imports (of intermediates) are used to produce exports and hence bilateral gross exports may include inputs (i.e., value added) from third party countries (Stehrer, 2012). TiVA reveals where (e.g., in which country or industry) and how (e.g. by capital or labour) value is added or captured in global commodity chains (Timmer et al., 2014).

TiVA, which is sometimes referred to as the “value footprint”, is the monetary counterpart of the MRIO-based environmental footprint because both indicators follow the same system boundaries, i.e., all supply chains between production and final consumption of two countries including all direct and indirect interlinkages. Moreover, in contrast to global bilateral monetary trade flows, TiVA is globally balanced, meaning that national exports and imports globally sum up to zero. This is an important feature of the TiVA indicator that facilitates more consistent and unambiguous assessments.

for every unit of embodied raw material equivalent that the South imports from the North, they have to export on average five units to “pay” for it

For land the average ratio is also 5:1, for energy it is 3:1, and for labour it is 13:1

Table 1. Resource drain from the South.ResourceNorth → South flows 2015South → North flows 2015Drain from South in 2015Cumulative drain from South 1990–2015Raw material equivalents [Gt]3.3715.3912.02254.40Embodied land [mn ha]527.421,349.01821.5932,987.23Embodied energy [EJ]21.5543.5121.06650.34Embodied labour [mn py-eq]31.11219.22188.125,956.62

in the year 2015 the North’s net appropriation from the South totalled 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalents of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work). By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.

significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.

Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition

material use is tightly linked to environmental pressures. It accounts for more than 90% of variation in environmental damage indicators (Steinmann et al., 2017), and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress (International Resource Panel, 2019). Moreover, as Van der Voet et al. (2004) demonstrate, while impacts vary by material, and vary as technologies change, there is a coupling between aggregate mass flows and ecological impact. Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.

Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012)

Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).

the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price.

Prices under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the (im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour, core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in other words, they are a political artefact

While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.

Fig. 2 shows that drain from the South in 2015 amounted to $14.1 trillion when measured in terms of raw material equivalents, $5.1 trillion when measured in terms of land, $3.6 trillion when measured in terms of energy and $20.3 trillion when measured in terms of labour.

Over the period 1990–2015, the drain sums to $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This represents a significant “windfall” for the North, similar to the windfall that was derived from colonial forms of appropriation; i.e., goods that did not have to be produced on the domestic landmass or with domestic labour, and did not have to be bought on the domestic market, or paid for with exports (see Pomeranz, 2000, Patnaik, 2018). While previous studies have shown that the price distortion factor increased dramatically during the structural adjustment period in the 1980’s (Hickel et al., 2021), our data confirms that since the early- to mid-1990’s it has tended to decline slightly. This means that the increase in drain during the period 1990–2007, prior to the global financial crisis, was driven primarily by an increase in the volume of international trade rather than by an increase in price distortion.

Table 3 shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.

the North’s reliance on appropriation from the South has generally increased over the period (despite a significant drop after the global financial crisis), whereas the South’s losses as a share of total economic activity have generally decreased, particularly since 2003, due to an increase in South-South trading and higher domestic GDP creation or capture within the South, both driven largely by China

Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries. But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.

net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80

for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain

The dominant narrative of international development holds that poor countries are poor because of their own internal failings and are therefore in need of assistance. But the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice. These results indicate that combating the deleterious effects of unequal exchange by making the global economy fairer and more equitable would be much more effective, in terms of development, than charity.

In an equitable world, the resource trade deficit that the North sustains in relation to the South would be financed with a parallel monetary trade deficit. But in reality, the monetary trade deficit is very small, equivalent to only about 1% of global trade revenues, and fluctuates between North and South. In effect, this means that the North achieves its large net appropriation of resources and labour from the South gratis.

The question of sectoral disparities has been moot since the 1980s, however, as industrial production has shifted overwhelmingly to the South. The majority of Southern exports (70%) consist of manufactured goods (data from UNCTAD; see Smith, 2016). Of all the manufactured goods that the USA imports, 60% are produced in developing countries. For Japan it is 70%. We can see this pattern reflected also in the industrial workforce. As of 2010, at least 79% of the world’s industrial workers live in the South (data from the ILO; see Smith, 2016). This shift is due in large part to the rise of global commodity chains, which now constitute 70% of international trade. Between 1995 and 2013, there has been an increase of 157 million jobs related to global commodity chains, and an estimated 116 million of them are concentrated in the South, predominantly in the export manufacturing sector (ILO, 2015). In other words, during the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.

if Northern states or firms leverage monopoly power within global commodity chains to depress the prices of imports and increase the prices of final products, their labour “productivity” appears to improve, and that of their counterparts declines, even if the underlying production process remains unchanged. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).

wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).

the terminology of “value-added” is a misnomer. In international trade, TiVA does not tell us who adds more value but rather who has more power to command prices. And in the case of global commodity chains, TiVA does not indicate where value is produced but rather where it is captured (Smith, 2016).

our analysis reveals that value in global commodity chains is disproportionately produced by the South, but disproportionately captured by the North (as GDP). Value captured in this manner is misleadingly attributed to Northern economic activities

rich countries are able to maintain price inequalities simply by virtue of being rich. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. Just as in a national economy wage rates are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis capital, so too in international trade prices are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of national economies and corporate actors vis-à-vis their trading partners and suppliers. Countries that grew rich during the colonial period are now able to leverage their economic dominance to depress the costs of labour and resources extracted from the South. In other words, the North “finances” net appropriation from the South not with money, but rather by maintaining the prices of Southern resources and labour below the global average level.

Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141)

In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).

In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.

ubsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).

SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.

structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices

Cheap labour and raw materials in the global South are not “naturally” cheap, as if their cheapness was written in the stars. They are actively cheapened

the analysis obscures class and geographic inequalities within countries and regions, which are significant when it comes to labour prices as well as resource consumption. The high levels of resource consumption that characterize Northern economies are driven disproportionately by rich individuals and affluent areas, as well as by corporations that control supply chains, and enabled by internal patterns of exploitation and unequal exchange in addition to drain through trade (Harvey, 2005). For example, there are marginalized regions of the United States that serve as an “internal periphery” (Wishart, 2014). It would also be useful to explore the gender dynamics of unequal exchange within countries. These questions cannot be answered with our data, however.

This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.

support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77

True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.

It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.

democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy.

end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity

a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices

Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.

Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today

In chapter 7 of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin defined the five “basic features” of imperialism: (1) the concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of banking capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.8

Marxist theories of imperialism (or concepts of imperialism inspired by the Marxist tradition) that evolved after the mid–twentieth century typically defined imperialism as a relationship of economic exploitation leading to unequal distribution of wealth and power on a global scale.9

In chapter 8 of Imperialism, Lenin further argued that export of capital was “one of the most essential bases of imperialism” because it allowed the imperialist countries to “live by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.” The superprofits exploited from the colonies in turn could be used to buy off the “upper stratum” of the working class who would become the social base of opportunism in the working-class movement: “Imperialism means the partition of the world, and the exploitation of other countries besides China, which means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries, creating the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat.”14

imperialism must be a system where a small minority of the world population exploits the great majority. It cannot possibly be a system in which the majority exploits the minority.

From 2004 to 2018, China’s total foreign assets increased from $929 billion to $7.32 trillion. During the same period, China’s total foreign liabilities (that is, total foreign investment in China) increased from $693 billion to $5.19 trillion.16 This means China had a net investment position of $2.13 trillion at the end of 2018. That is, China has not only accumulated trillions of dollars of overseas assets but also become a large net creditor in the global capital market. This seems to support the argument that China is now exporting massive amounts of capital and therefore qualifies as an imperialist country.

Rather than “exploiting” the developed capitalist countries, such capital flight in fact transfers resources from China to the core of the capitalist world system.

while foreign investment in China is dominated by direct investment, an investment form consistent with the foreign capitalist attempt to exploit China’s cheap labor and natural resources, reserve assets account for the largest component of China’s overseas assets.

the United States and other developed capitalist countries simply do not have the production capacity to produce within a reasonable period of time the extra goods and services that may correspond to the more than three trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves held by China

From the U.S. point of view, China’s accumulation of foreign exchange reserves (mostly in dollar-denominated assets) has essentially allowed it to “purchase” trillions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods largely by printing money without providing any material goods in return. China’s reserve assets, rather than being a part of China’s imperialist wealth, essentially constitute China’s informal tribute to U.S. imperialism by paying for the latter’s “seigniorage privilege.”

An average rate of return of about 3 percent on China’s overseas investment obviously does not constitute “superprofits.” Moreover, foreign capitalists in China are able to make about twice as much profit as Chinese capital can make in the rest of the world on a given amount of investment.

China’s total stock of direct investment abroad in 2017 was $1.81 trillion, including $1.14 trillion invested in Asia (63 percent), $43 billion invested in Africa (2.4 percent), $111 billion invested in Europe (6.1 percent), $387 billion invested in Latin America and the Caribbean (21 percent), $87 billion invested in North America (4.8 percent), and $42 billion invested in Australia and New Zealand (2.3 percent).

China’s massive investments in Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Cayman Islands, and British Virgin Islands (altogether $1.41 trillion or 78 percent of China’s direct investment abroad) are obviously not intended to exploit abundant natural resources or labor in these cities or islands.

Much of the Chinese investment in these places may simply have to do with money laundering and capital flight

the structure of China’s overseas assets is very different from the structure of foreign assets in China. Out of China’s total overseas assets in 2018, 43 percent consists of reserve assets, 26 percent is direct investment abroad, 7 percent is portfolio investment abroad, and 24 percent is other investment (currency and deposits, loans, trade credits, and so on). By comparison, out of total foreign investment in China in 2018, 53 percent is foreign direct investment, 21 percent is foreign portfolio investment, and 26 percent is other investment.

about $158 billion (8.7 percent of China’s total stock of direct investment abroad or 2.2 percent of China’s total overseas assets) invested in Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia. This part of Chinese investment no doubt exploits the peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America of their labor and natural resources. But it is a small fraction of China’s total overseas investment and an almost negligible part of the enormous total wealth that Chinese capitalists have accumulated

Marxist theorists of imperialism already realized that, in the postcolonial era, imperial exploitation of underdeveloped countries mainly took the form of unequal exchange. That is, underdeveloped countries (peripheral capitalist countries) typically export commodities that embody comparatively more labor than the labor embodied in commodities exported by developed capitalist countries (imperialist countries). In the twenty-first century, global outsourcing by transnational corporations based on the massive wage differentials between workers in imperialist and peripheral countries may be seen as a special form of unequal exchange.22

if a country receives substantially more surplus value from the rest of the world than it transfers, then the country clearly qualifies as an imperialist country in the sense of being an exploiter country in the capitalist world system. On the other hand, if a country transfers substantially more surplus value to the imperialist countries than it receives from the transfer of the rest of the world, the country would be either a peripheral or a semi-peripheral member of the capitalist world system (depending on further study of the country’s position relative to other peripheral and semi-peripheral countries).

even if in the unlikely event that China turns out to be extremely successful in its effort to promote electric cars, it would at best replace no more than one-tenth of China’s current oil consumption.

Being a leading imperialist country, the United States benefits from its “seigniorage privilege.” Because of the other countries’ need to hold massive amounts of foreign exchange reserves in the form of dollar-denominated assets, the United States can “purchase” trillions of dollars of goods simply by printing money without providing material goods in return. The labor embodied in the U.S. “trade deficits” therefore should be treated essentially as unilateral transfers from the rest of the world and included in the unequal exchange.

Sources: “World Development Indicators,” World Bank, accessed May 31, 2021. Net labor transfer is defined as the difference between the total labor embodied in a country’s imported goods and services and the total labor embodied in the country’s exported goods and services. If the difference is positive, it constitutes a net labor gain; if negative, it constitutes a net labor loss.

in the neoliberal era, Chinese capitalism has functioned as a crucial pillar for the global capitalist economy by transferring surplus value produced by tens of millions of workers to the imperialist countries. At its peak, China’s net labor loss equaled 48 percent of China’s industrial labor force in 2007

Had there not been unequal exchange, the massive amounts of material goods currently supplied to the United States by the rest of the world would have to be produced through domestic production to maintain existing levels of U.S. material consumption. About sixty million workers (38 percent of the total U.S. labor force) would have to be withdrawn from service sectors and transferred to material production sectors. This would result in a massive reduction of services output (by about two-fifths of U.S. GDP) without raising levels of material consumption.

By 2015–17, while it would still take about five units of Chinese labor to exchange for one unit of U.S. labor and four units of Chinese labor to exchange for one unit of labor from other high-income countries, China had clearly established exploitative positions in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. One unit of Chinese labor can now be exchanged for about two units of labor from sub-Saharan Africa or four units of labor from South Asia. One unit of Chinese labor is roughly on a par with one unit of labor from the low- and middle-income countries of Latin America, Caribbean, Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. In addition, China has also established a significant advantage relative to other East Asian low- and middle-income countries.

The core countries specialize in quasi-monopolistic, high-profit production processes, and the peripheral countries specialize in highly competitive, low-profit production processes. Surplus value is transferred from the peripheral producers to the core producers, resulting in unequal exchange and concentration of world wealth in the core. By comparison, semi-peripheral countries have “a relatively even mix” of core-like and periphery-like production processes.23

From 1870 to 1970, the share of the world population that lived in countries with per capita GDP greater than 75 percent of the imperial standard varied between 10 percent (in 1950) and 17 percent (in 1913). This is a range consistent with the population share of “a handful of exceptionally rich and powerful states” suggested by Lenin.

reasonable to use 75 percent of the imperial standard as the approximate threshold between the core of the capitalist world system and the semi-periphery. It is important to note that this is only an approximate threshold and other important characteristics (such as state strength, degree of political and economic independence, technological sophistication, and so on) also need to be considered when deciding whether a country is a member of the core or simply has a core-like income level. For example, in 1970, among the wealthiest countries were rich oil exporters such as Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela that clearly do not qualify as core countries.

From 1870 to 1970, the share of the world population that lived in countries with per capita GDP less than 25 percent of the imperial standard increased from 57 percent to 66 percent, suggesting widening global inequalities. I use 25 percent of the imperial standard as the approximate threshold between the periphery and the semi-periphery.

by 2017, as China’s per capita GDP advanced to 31 percent of the imperial standard, the structure of world income distribution was radically transformed. The share of the population that lived in countries with per capita GDP less than 25 percent of the imperial standard fell to 50 percent (the lowest since 1870). The share of the population that lived in countries with per capita GDP higher than 75 percent of the imperial standard narrowed to 12 percent. At the same time, the share of the population that lived in countries with per capita GDP between 25 and 75 percent of the imperial standard expanded to 38 percent (almost double the historical semi-peripheral share of the world population).

Neither capitalism nor imperialism is compatible with an arrangement where the majority of the world population exploits the minority, or even with a situation where a large minority exploits the rest of the world. Given the size of the Chinese population (almost one-fifth of the world population), if China were to advance into the core, the total core population would have to rise to about one-third of the world population. Can the rest of the world afford to provide sufficient surplus value (in the form of labor embodied in commodities) as well as energy resources to support such a top-heavy capitalist world system?

South Asia has recently overtaken China to become the largest source of net labor transfer in the global capitalist economy. In 2017, South Asia suffered a net labor loss of 65 million worker-years. All the low- and middle-income countries combined provided a total net labor transfer of 184 million worker-years in 2017

Assuming that China’s average labor terms of trade rises from the current level of about 0.5 (one unit of Chinese labor exchanges for about half of a unit of foreign labor) to about 2 (one unit of Chinese labor exchanges for about two units of foreign labor, similar to the current average labor terms of trade of the non-U.S. high-income countries), then the total labor embodied in China’s imported goods and services would have to rise to about 180 million worker-years. Rather than providing a net labor transfer of nearly 50 million worker-years, China will have to extract 90 million worker-years from the rest of the world. The total shift of 140 million worker-years represents about three-quarters of the total surplus value currently received by the core and the upper-level semi-periphery from the rest of the world and is roughly comparable to the total net labor transfer currently provided by all the low- and middle-income countries (excluding China).

to replace China’s current annual car production by electric vehicles would require the consumption of 120,000 metric tons of lithium annually. World total lithium production in 2018 was only 62,000 metric tons. Therefore, even if China uses up the entire world’s lithium production, it would only be sufficient to replace about one-half of China’s conventional car production.27

China was a typical peripheral country in the 1990s. In the early 1990s, China’s labor terms of trade was about 0.05. That is, one unit of foreign labor could be exchanged for about twenty units of Chinese labor. Since then, China’s labor terms of trade has improved dramatically. By 2016–17, China’s labor terms of trade rose to about 0.5. That is, two units of Chinese labor could be exchanged for about one unit of foreign labor. On balance, China remains an economy exploited by the imperialist countries in the capitalist world system, although the degree of exploitation has declined rapidly in recent years.

The world population in 2018 was 7.59 billion. Using the more generous 1.4 trillion metric tons as the global emissions budget for the rest of the twenty-first century, an average person in the future is entitled to an average annual emissions budget of about 2.3 metric tons per person per year (1.4 trillion metric tons / 80 years / 7.6 billion people). By comparison, China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 6.77 metric tons and the U.S. per capita carbon dioxide emissions were 15.73 metric tons.

From 1990 to 2013, China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions surged from 2.05 metric tons to 6.81 metric tons. If this trend were to continue, China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions would rise to 12.85 metric tons when China’s per capita GDP rises to $37,734 (75 percent of the imperial standard). If every person in the world were to generate this level of emissions every year between now and the end of the century, global cumulative emissions over the last eight decades of this century would amount to 7.8 trillion metric tons, leading to 5.5 degrees Celsius of additional warming (using the approximate calculation that every one trillion tons of carbon dioxide emissions would bring about 0.7 degrees Celsius of additional warming).

China’s current per capita carbon dioxide emissions are substantially above what would be predicted by the cross-country regression given China’s current income level. Using the cross-country regression, if China’s per capita GDP were to rise to $37,734, China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions should be 8.67 metric tons. If every person in the world were to generate emissions of 8.67 tons every year between now and the end of the century, global cumulative emissions over the last eight decades of this century would amount to 5.3 trillion metric tons, leading to 3.7 degrees Celsius of additional warming. As the global average temperature is already about one degree Celsius higher than the preindustrial level, global warming by the end of the century would be 4.7 degrees Celsius. This will lead to inevitable runaway global warming and reduce the areas suitable for human inhabitation to a small fraction of the earth’s land surface.

In other words, climate stabilization and global ecological sustainability can be accomplished if every country either accepts a massive reduction of per capita income to peripheral levels or stays with the peripheral levels.

The currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core (historical imperialist countries) than it receives from the periphery. However, China’s per capita GDP has risen to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels and, in term of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half of the world population (including Africa, South Asia, and parts of East Asia). Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.

Given its enormous population, there is no way for China to become a core country without dramatically expanding the population share of the wealthy top layer of the world system. The implied labor extraction (or transfer of surplus value) demanded from the rest of the world would be so large that it is unlikely to be met by the remaining periphery reduced in population size. Moreover, the required energy resources (especially oil) associated with China’s expected core status cannot be realistically satisfied from either future growth of world oil production or conceivable technical change. In the unlikely event that China does advance into the core, the associated greenhouse gas emissions will contribute to rapid exhaustion of the world’s remaining emissions budget, making global warming by less than two degrees Celsius all but impossible.

“The harm that [tea] causes is especially visible in the [Tunisian] countryside, where it weakens the race, which is literally intoxicated and morally and physically diminished.”

In 1941, the French doctor Edmond Sergent described in several scientific articles how Tunisians, instead of adding fresh tea leaves to already boiling water, added used leaves to the water as it boiled, creating a harmful, tar-like drink. Sergent also argued that Tunisians’ black tea was more dangerous than Moroccan green tea, which explained why cases of teaism were rare in Morocco, despite Morocco’s tea consumption being much higher.

According to Dinguizli, teaism was an addiction comparable to alcoholism, a form of chronic poisoning with nervous tremors, amnesia, palpitations, blurred vision, serious disturbances of the nervous and circulatory system, a general weakening of the body, and even a marked decrease in birth rates. Later authors delineated additional mental consequences, such as hallucinations, delusions, and even psychoses.

The perceived social consequences of teaism were founded in the belief that tea addicts would do almost anything to satisfy their habit. According to Sergent, the whole salary of many Tunisian workers went “to the buying of tea and sugar.” When their money ran out, Tunisian teaists sold their last possessions, stole from employers, friends, and family, and, in Dinguizli’s words, lost their “usually docile character.”

By the 1940s, a variety of publications had ceased to view teaism as an exclusively Tunisian problem, as diagnoses cropped up elsewhere in the Maghreb, such as, in 1948, the psychiatrist Charles Bardenat offhandedly ascribing an act of conjugal manslaughter committed in Algeria to the overconsumption of coffee and tea.

not a single case of a French settler in Tunisia being diagnosed with teaism can be found in the French publications.

French administrators tried banning illegal coffeehouses, which served tea, and increasing customs duties on tea. There were also calls for posters and educational films on the dangers of tea and how to prepare it correctly, for creating a state monopoly on tea, and even a law restricting tea sales to pharmacies upon presentation of a prescription

Tea neither produced hallucinations nor induced crime, and it did not “corrupt” Tunisians. They simply enjoyed a new drink that French authors objected to.

When tea first reached England in the 17th and 18th centuries, writers described it as un-British, “unmanly,” and altogether dangerous

chocolate, once the drink of choice at rowdy British clubs, inspired similar concern

The French viewed coffee, which was produced in their colonies of Martinique and La Réunion, as the drink of the Enlightenment and reason

The sight of Tunisians sitting and chatting over tea fueled settler prejudices about Tunisians as lazy and immoderate—nearly all descriptions of teaism focused on the economic consequences

feared attacks, revolt, and any sign of the population losing their supposed “docility.”

The irony of teaism is that the only real epidemic was the diagnosis of teaism itself. Today, tea is practically Tunisia’s national drink

What do you think life will be like when the interest rate is five percent higher? Ten? You will be wiped out. It won’t take years. It will just take months.It will happen with stunning, vicious, disbelieving speed. People become homeless. And jobless. And broke. And hungry. And sick. Is this sounding catastrophic enough to you yet? Do you think I’m kidding around? Can you pick any holes in the logic above? Go ahead and try. Don’t you think I would already know? This is the real deal, my friends, bona fide self-inflicted catastrophe, without parallel in modern history

shortages have devastating second and third order effects, like stagflation, depression, and collapse

People, now having to focus on bitter self-preservation, do something paradoxical and foolish — they swing harder and harder to the right. Think Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany. Am I saying Britain’s going to go full fascist? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I am saying that where the economic effect of even a soft Brexit will be economic catastrophe, the political effect of the economic effect will be a vicious circle, a feedback loop of ruin.

To undo sudden falls into poverty, a society needs to invest in itself — build hospitals, roads, schools, even just dig ditches. But a society of people focused on self-preservation doesn’t choose that often. It chooses to “tighten its belt” at the precise moment everyone should agree to just shower everyone else with money (it’s imaginary, remember?). In this, the economic effect of Brexit will be devastating, middle class implosion, working class immiseration — but the political effect will be even more lethal: it will produce a loop of austerity.

What happens when a society chooses austerity — apart from the fact that it gets even poorer, so it chooses more austerity, so it gets poorer, like America? What are the sociocultural consequences of austerity? Just look at America — the canonical example. A culture of intelligence, grace, wisdom, and truth becomes a loutish, brutish thing. People are turning on one another economically — now they do so culturally. Racism and hate all rise. But so do ignorance, folly, greed, and spite — because people are living much, much harder lives. You can’t get insulin — remember? Who’s fault is it? Maybe it’s that nasty Jew’s fault. Maybe it’s that dirty Muslim’s fault.

About half of Britain’s medicine comes from the EU. Half of its medicine. Like food, medicine is perishable. Like food, it must be transported with care. But now even the most minimal checks will disrupt the process — even under a soft Brexit. Wham! A nation goes short of medicine. How badly so? Well, consider for a moment that Britain imports all its insulin. What happens when even 20% of that insulin spoils? 30%? 50%? Where will it come from, exactly? Who will pay for it?

all the most lethal maladies of the body social — authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, kleptocracy

Remember all those shortages of food and medicine? See those American hedge funds, hungry for more profit? It’s a marriage made in hell. Brits will have to import American food, medicine, and so forth. But it’s a rip-off. It comes with broken systems attached to it — deficient healthcare, jobs that aren’t, pay that never rises, savings that are spent desperately buying it, because it costs an exploitatively huge amount in the end

Brits will be harvested for more and more profit every year — just like Americans have been, by their banks, corporations, hedge funds, all their institutions. There will be more NHS, no more BBC, no more M&S — there will be HMOs and Fox News and Walmart. There will be engines of exploitation and abuse more vicious than Brits really understand still exist

 isn’t all that…being colonized?

Brexit is the bitter, stubborn, stupid last stand of the colonial empire-builder — the one who imagines, shaking a fist, sneering at this world in which he is no longer on top, that he is still the master his great-grandfather was.

That is the dead end of the road Brexit goes nowhere to — one’s own self-colonization. Destroying one’s own society — in the name of power, control, dominance. So one can climb over the jagged, jumbled ruins and cry, “But see! I am still the master! Here is my dominion!!” Never mind it is is just a wasteland now — at least you are in charge of it all again.

Only the colonized can tell you what it is like to be colonized. When you are, stupidly, astonishingly, colonizing yourself. How you are. That you are. But it is at that precise moment the fallen colonizer, dreaming desperately of empire, haunted by its ghost, is least likely to know anything but the insatiable need for power and control at all.

showing and practicing sovereignty over a Hindu or a Muslim in Asia is not very different from showing and exercising sovereignty over a tree or a river in the forests of Peru or Ecuador. I call each instance an epistemological “genetic slice” where the totality of such instances amounts to a unique but structured modern attitude toward the world

To critique Orientalism is to critique secular humanism, liberalism, anthropocentrism, materialism, capitalism -- all of which, and more, Said took for granted. 

Even if we were to concede—however objectionable and repugnant this may be— that modernity’s violent tools were adopted by necessity with a view to improving the human condition, we find ourselves facing the bitter reality of a world in which we have destroyed almost everything around us, from communal and social structures to ecology and environment.

My argument is that modernity’s structure of thought created a novel relationship between man and nature, one that produced a pathological sense of domination over nature, including our own.

Colonialism did not start in the colonies, but in Europe itself, and this is because early modern Europe embarked on a quest in which knowledge was systematically harnessed to subjugate nature, including our own selves. Orientalism is nothing more than a strand of discourse by which this bleak result was achieved, but every branch of knowledge – philosophy, science, law, etc.– is equally involved in the same project

I think that the position which argues that one cannot critique modernity from within modernity—necessarily the only place in which we find ourselves— is a nihilistic one

in modernity, the state, capitalism, bureaucracy, and a particular form of reason have become central domains that govern all other domains. These central domains have formed our subjectivities, and made us who we are. My argument is that we can capitalize on the peripheral domains, through an act of heuristic retrieval, in order to displace the central domains. And ethics is one peripheral domain from which we can begin to rethink who we are.

the urgent call for us to be self-conscious about what we are doing at large and what we are “saying” and writing in learning institutions, higher academia being a main concern. This is so because this academia manufactures much of what we know, and this manufactured knowledge has substantial power in deciding what we should or should not do in our lives. Essential to this self-consciousness is the need for us to understand and develop a deep sense of responsibility and accountability, [and] not in the narrow sense of being “conscientious citizens” or socially responsible individuals. What I mean is that responsibility and accountability must run deep into an awareness of everything we do, from the seemingly innocuous act of buying a soft drink from a convenience store to what we think of what, say, business and public policy mean to less powerful others around the world.

to make the change and to build a sense of ethical responsibility, academia must deploy what I call external critique of everything we teach and write about. External critique is to refuse the established premises and assumptions that have so far foregrounded our thoughts and actions; it is to refuse the very foundations of their logic. The critique must question who and what we are

When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company

In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.

Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012

From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars

where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million

From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.

not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined.

“the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018” with an “operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017.” According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed’s profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed’s CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.

weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually

research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed “multiplier effect,” defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it’s about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished

As Brown University’s Costs of War project has reported, “$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.”

In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll

Reports from the industry’s own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis, it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier

add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington

since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.” 

war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as “great captains.”

The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable:

American society’s almost complete isolation from war’s deadly effects:

Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy

An unrepresentative government

America’s persistent empathy gap

Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

even the Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is climate change, not China or Russia or terror

The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.

Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the existence of significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures to rise even as food and other resources dwindle. Under the circumstances, what’s the best strategy for survival: killing each other while ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?

Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.

war is a bloody, murderous mess and those practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer

We need to stop idealizing war and idolizing its so-called warriors

lands are being stolen and mismanaged by colonists who believe that their environmental and clean energy projects – eco-tourism, national parks, and hydroelectric dams  – will be more effective than millennia of land stewardship by Indigenous Peoples

The idea that we could build a truly fair and sustainable society using those foundational European institutions and environmental relations must be thrown out entirely. This makes many people, even the most anti-racist leftists, deeply uncomfortable, because it means we have to reorganize all aspects of life as we know it.

When coupled with the cattle’s overgrazing, invasive Eurasian plants began beating out native grasses and plants while retaining less water and carbon in the soil. Concentrations of cattle increased throughout the 20th century, and instead of letting them graze, farmers began fattening them up in crowded pens called feedlots, which in turn increased the need to cultivate wheat, corn, and soy to feed the cows. Ancient, well-managed prairie was aggressively tilled for the first time, exposing the soil to the air. Some experts have argued that it resulted in a period of severe and destructive dust storms on the Prairies in the 1930s. Today, farmers help prevent this erosion and increase their crop yields with intensive irrigation from underground aquifers that are nearly bled dry – a practice that some studies estimate will leave millions on the Great Plains without water for crops, livestock, or human settlements within a century.

Before colonization, an estimated 30 million bison roamed Turtle Island, but by the end of the 19th century their numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,000 thanks to colonial policies and hunting by settlers. “The majority of Indigenous people have forgotten their connection to our ancestral animal,” Joely says. “Most have never eaten buffalo, seen a buffalo up close, smelled one. Almost all have never scraped the fat and meat off one to tan it.” In 2015, she co-founded the Buffalo People Arts Institute (BPAI), a non-profit whose mission is to “bring back the buffalo emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically,” including by running workshops on bison hide tanning.  

Like oil and gas, commercial wheat, beef, and salmon farming on Turtle Island are unsustainable extractive industries with product prices that do not match the real human and ecological cost

“We’re willing to wield science as a tool in our work because truly, our people were scientists,” Jess tells me. “We had systems for organizing and transmitting knowledge. We developed practices, teachings, and laws based on our careful experimentation and observation, our code of ethics, our rigour, our intelligence, our drive to understand the world around us. We don’t differentiate between ‘our knowledge’ and ‘science.’ We differentiate between frameworks: ‘Haíɫzaqv science’ and ‘western science.’” There is no confusion in the community about which methods are most appropriate for Haíɫzaqv people or their territory. “We’ve seen decades of academics coming into our territory to earn degrees studying obscure things that have no practical application here. That doesn’t happen anymore. We now have relationships with academic institutions that allow us to be an early point of contact for researchers in all fields who want to come into the territory. They’re expected to develop projects that will advance our territorial governance and stewardship.”

fish farms are disease accelerators,  making both wild populations of fish and humans more vulnerable to a host of pathogens while the industry focuses solely on streamlined production

“The way the western world talks about Indigenous knowledge by and large does it a disservice,” Jess says. “It’s treated like a new-age novelty or a tokenistic box to check on a referral or consultation strategy. It’s deeper than that. It’s sacred, nuanced, organized, and rooted in deep relationships with the world around us. It’s careful. It’s observant. It’s adaptive. It’s not fodder for some generic inspirational Indian proverb meme. It’s a living system by which many of us still organize our lives and map our identities.”

Weirs have long been used by Indigenous fishers to track salmon populations and help make sure they weren’t overfishing – until the late 1800s, when the Dominion of Canada banned Indigenous fishing technologies, under pressure from industrial fisheries which wanted to exploit salmon stocks without competition.  Today, the revival of the weir allows scientists to monitor the salmon’s movement through their tags and study the impact that variables like water temperature have on their populations. They’ve found that high water temperatures are associated with higher rates of death in migrating adult sockeye salmon – a crucial insight into how climate change will affect biodiversity and food security.  A Haíɫzaqv-led non-profit, Qqs Projects Society, is a key partner on the project, and brings children to visit the weir, teaching them about their relationship with the salmon, the logic of traditional technologies, and the respect for life that is crucial to the continuation of their subsistence systems.

The legacy of colonialism and its style of private land management is still an obstacle in reintroducing bison to their ancestral habitats. Cattle ranchers vehemently oppose expanding bison ranches, arguing that bison may pass diseases to cattle herds.  But both Indigenous and settler sciences affirm the benefits of bison for both habitat restoration and human health.  “When the buffalo return, new species return, ecosystems return that were dormant. They can survive on their own with little intervention, in comparison to cattle,”

“Part of our work is feeding people buffalo at community feasts and getting them used to eating it again. Our diets, historically, were changed from buffalo, vegetables, and fruit from the land to pork, salt, sugar, and flour. There is no wonder why diabetes consumes our communities.”

“Looking back does not mean we need to stop our Indigenous cultures from growing,” she adds. “I support solar and wind power. I support modern technologies. There has to be a way to come together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures to join methodologies and practices for the health and well-being of future generations.”

In contrast to stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as hunter-gatherers, oral histories and research prove that Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific Northwest have been farming clams for over 1,000 years – constructing stone terraces and stacking sediments in the tidal column to perfect clam-growing conditions and harvesting selectively to feed large numbers of people without decimating the clam population.  Even so, the myth that Indigenous Peoples were solely foragers, not farmers, was leveraged by colonial governments to justify stripping Indigenous nations of their land base.

The destruction wrought by colonization cannot be undone, but we can recover from it. Tiffany explains that one must “be strong enough to let the land govern you.” In this sense, “Land Back” is not just the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of First Nations, but a reminder that “the land is sovereign and the land is what you should obey,” she says. It is a call for us all to take responsibility in maintaining a meaningful relationship of reciprocity with the land. 

Our current problems are the result of a number of historical conditions being realized, and are not a fundamental manifestation of our nature, evolutionary trajectory, or destiny. Designing a society that makes happy humans with healthy bodies and minds in resilient ecosystems does not involve “going back” to any ideal period of history, but it does require us recognizing that Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship are and will continue to be successful; that ecosystems have regulating functions that are better at preventing pandemics and responding to climate change than present human technology; and that the legacy of industrial agriculture, capitalism, and its exploitation of people and the planet should no longer be the standard that shapes our vision of progress.

transnational protests have become more frequent now because of social media. Images and videos of police brutality and the mass demonstrations in response, distributed through diasporas and beyond, can energize and galvanize large numbers quickly. The pace at which these connections can be both made and amplified has been boosted, just as the extent of their appeal has broadened. Trayvon Martin was a household name in Europe in a way that Emmett Till never has been.

Well into my thirties, I was far more knowledgeable about the literature and history of Black America than I was about that of Black Britain, where I was born and raised, or indeed of the Caribbean, where my parents are from. Black America has a hegemonic authority in the black diaspora because, marginalized though it has been within America, it has a reach that no other black minority can match.

the power of empire. The closer you are to the center, the less you need know about the periphery, and vice-versa

Europe has every bit as vile a history of racism as the Americas—indeed, the histories are entwined. The most pertinent difference between Europe and the US in this regard is simply that Europe practiced its most egregious forms of anti-black racism—slavery, colonialism, segregation—outside its borders. America internalized those things.

George Floyd’s killing comes at a moment when America’s standing has never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects of American power. The day after Trump’s inauguration, there were women’s marches in eighty-four countries; and today, his arrival in most European capitals provokes huge protests. By his behavior at international meetings, and his resolve to pull out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, he has made his contempt for the rest of the world clear. And, for the most part, it is warmly reciprocated.

Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period. It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office. It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.

There has always been a strong internationalist current of anti-racism, alongside anti-fascism, in the European Left tradition, which provided fertile ground for the struggles of African Americans. Back in the 1860s, Lancashire mill workers, despite being impoverished themselves by the blockade on Confederacy that caused the supply of cotton to dry up, resisted calls to end the boycott of Southern goods, though it cost them their livelihoods. In the early 1970s, the Free Angela Davis campaign told The New York Times that it had received 100,000 letters of support from East Germany alone—too many to even open.

If Europe has a proven talent for anti-racist solidarity with Black America, one that has once again come to fore with the uprisings in the US, it also has a history of exporting racism around the world

the rejection of US foreign policy and power—at times, reflexive and crude but rarely completely unjustified—never entailed a wholescale repudiation of American culture or potential.

Our civil rights movement was in Jamaica, Ghana, India, and so on. In the post-colonial era, this offshoring of responsibility has left significant room for denial, distortion, ignorance, and sophistry when it comes to understanding that history.

“It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire,” wrote George Orwell in “England Your England.” “In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists.” In 1951, a decade after that essay was published, the UK government’s social survey revealed that nearly three-fifths of respondents could not name a single British colony.

One in two Dutch people, one in three of Britons, one in four of the French and Belgians, and one in five Italians believe that their country’s former empire is something to be proud of, according to a YouGov poll from March of this year.

only one in twenty Dutch, one in seven French, one in five Britons, and one in four Belgians and Italians regard their former empires as something to be ashamed of

The level of understanding about race and racism among white Europeans, even those who would consider themselves sympathetic, cultured, and informed, is woefully low

Fascism is once again a mainstream ideology on the continent, with openly racist parties a central feature of the landscape, framing policy and debate even when they are not in power. There are no viral videos of refugees in their last desperate moments, struggling for breath before plunging into the Mediterranean (possibly headed to a country, Italy, that levies fines on anyone who does rescue them).

Levels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation, and poverty are all higher for black Europeans. Perhaps only because the continent is not blighted by the gun culture of the US, racism here is less lethal. But it is just as prevalent in other ways. Racial disparities in Covid-19 mortality in Britain, for example, are comparable to those in America. Between 2005 and 2015, there were race-related riots or rebellions in Britain, Italy, Belgium, France, and Bulgaria. The precariousness of black life in late capitalism is not unique to America, even if it is most often and glaringly laid bare there. To that extent, Black Lives Matter exists as a floating signifier that can find a home in most European cities and beyond.

There is no reason, of course, why the existence of racism in one place should deny one the right to talk about racism in another place. (If that were the case, the anti-apartheid movement would never have got off the ground in the West.) But it does mean having to be mindful about how one does it.

In my experience, drawing connections, continuities, and contrasts between the racisms on either side of the Atlantic invites something between rebuke and confusion from many white European liberals. Few will deny the existence of racism in their own countries but they insist on trying to force an admission that it “is better ‘here than there’”—as though we should be happy with the racism we have.

“Racism’s bad everywhere,” has always been my retort. “There really is no ‘better’ kind.”

after the Pick-Sloan plan dammed the Upper Missouri River with a series of five earthen-rolled dams in the mid-twentieth century for hydroelectricity and irrigation, 75 percent of wildlife and native plants on the area’s reservations disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of acres of Indigenous farms were destroyed

What was once a subsistence economy based on wild harvesting and small-scale agriculture was transformed almost overnight into dependency on USDA commodities. White flour, milk, white sugar, and canned foods replaced formerly protein- and nutrient-rich diets. Diabetes rates skyrocketed, and its spread can be contact-traced to a single public works project.

The government has once again made clear that the lives of the poor—especially the Black and Indigenous poor—are less sacred than private property

The Navajo Nation, whose lands helped make the United States the world’s largest oil producer, now faces some of the worst rates of infection and death—not only compared to other states, but to entire countries. About 30 percent of its reservation population lives without running water, and about 10 percent without electricity, while coal from its lands fuels power plants, and the water from its rivers soaks golf courses in Phoenix. The United States created the first nuclear bomb on a sacred Tewa mesa with uranium mined from Navajo lands, poisoning generations. For the Navajo people, the real pandemic is—and has always been—resource colonization.

On May 20, five tribal organizations signed a letter to David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior (and a former oil lobbyist), calling for the resignation of assistant secretary of Indian affairs Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq Alaskan Native (also a former oil lobbyist) for what she had set into motion during the pandemic. In late February, as coronavirus swept through the country, a federal court denied the Mashpee Wampanoag the right to restore their homeland in Massachusetts, a process set into motion by Sweeney in 2018 that was overturned by a federal judge in June. Her office also failed to protect the Tohono O’odham Nation’s burial and sacred sites from being destroyed with explosives to build Trump’s border wall, the construction of which continued unabated as large sectors of the economy were shut down. Meanwhile, the Interior Department allowed for-profit Alaskan Native corporations, many of which have investments in the oil and gas industry, to seek payouts from the Covid-19 relief money reserved for tribal governments.

American Indian men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men, and American Indian women are incarcerated at six times the rate of white women

On April 28, three weeks after giving birth while in custody, Andrea Circle Bear, a thirty-year-old citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, became the first woman to die of coronavirus in federal prison. She was five months pregnant when sentenced to twenty-six months for a minor drug charge

Last month was the three-year anniversary of the killing of Zachary Bearheels, a twenty-nine-year-old citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. After suffering a mental breakdown and being kicked off a bus in Omaha while on his way back to Oklahoma City, police were filmed tasing Bearheels twelve times and punching him thirteen times in the head. “I can’t fucking breathe,” he told officers as he sat in the back of the cruiser. A coroner later found his cause of death to be “excited delirium,” a condition that supposedly leads to aggressiveness, incoherence, and “superhuman strength,” often after taking cocaine or methamphetamines. (Bearheels, however, had no drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his death.) This diagnosis is controversial; it is frequently cited when people die in police custody. Three of the officers involved in Bearheels’s death were reinstated in April.

The United States has a long history of sacrificing or killing off groups of people—through war or disease or both—in the name of its self-proclaimed destiny. This belief in the country’s violent superiority was already evident among the early Puritans, who attributed the mass die-off of Indigenous peoples to divine intervention.

To blind themselves to the destruction they wrought, colonizers wove cultural fictions about the “vastness” of a continent devoid of human civilization—terra nullius—and thus open for white European settlement. (This was an early ideological ancestor of the Zionist phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” that has come to justify the expulsion and colonization of Palestinians.)

Most historians have failed to draw what are obvious connections between heightened rates of infection and conditions of war, invasion, and colonialism. We need only look at the cholera outbreak in Yemen to see the relationship of disease to U.S. foreign policy. No one is disputing the fact that the infection of millions and the deaths of thousands there at the hands of this preventable disease are the result of a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war, which has destroyed Yemen’s health care infrastructure. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that one in four surgical amputations conducted at Red Cross centers in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are the result of diabetes. These three countries have been the staging ground for U.S.-backed military interventions and invasions that have disrupted critical food and medical supply chains.

Economic sanctions, frequently hailed by politicians of all stripes as a “humane” alternative to war, are simply war by another means. U.S. sanctions currently hit hard in thirty-nine countries—one-third of humanity—causing currency inflation and devaluation and upsetting the distribution of medicine, food, power, water treatment, and other human needs

the United States only knows violence. It convinces through force. It is numb to suffering and indifferent to the welfare of people

Trump has elevated U.S. belligerence to the cosmos.

Yet a new world is coming into existence, even as fires burn in the Amazon or on the streets of Minneapolis. It has always been here. It was present at Standing Rock, in the chants of “water is life”; it could be heard among the Wet’suwet’en calls to “heal the people, heal the land”; and it resounded once again as hundreds of thousands took to the street to demand that “Black lives matter.”

colonialism is not only a contest over territory, but over the meaning of life itself.

in the febrile atmosphere of post-9/11 America, the campus culture war metastasized. In the same way that conservative critics of “political correctness” aimed to shut down debate, so too did many of the same critics attack professors and students whose speech was deemed insufficiently patriotic or supportive of the War on Terror

None of the post-9/11 attacks on anti-war voices at Yale and beyond make it into the Buckley Program’s account of speech and dissent on college campuses

The conservative attacks on anti-war voices had more in common than a shared enemy. A few months after Gilmore published her Yale Daily News column, one researcher found that nearly all of the individuals and organizations orchestrating attacks on anti-war professors — including Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch, David Horowitz’s cluster of organizations and ACTA— could be traced back to a familiar set of deep pockets: the Bradley, Koch, Olin and Scaife foundations, among others. What Gilmore had originally taken to be “a broader trend among conservative commentators, who since September 11 have increasingly equated criticism of the Bush administration with lack of patriotism” was in fact, the researcher found, “only the tip of an iceberg of organizations, funded by a core group coordinating a right-wing agenda to put a chill on more than just academic speech.” At the time, Gilmore called it an “organized plot funded by right-wing foundations to shut down dissent.” 

this airbrushed story elides how much Buckley really shared with the far right, including his strident defenses of Jim Crow and McCarthyism and his long standing, open admiration for some of the 20th century’s most repressive and authoritarian right-wing regimes. Yet it is precisely those aspects of Buckley’s legacy that perhaps best explain the American right’s attacks on higher education.