Western politicians and journalists often claim that China is doing “colonialism” in Africa. This narrative has roots in US government discourse going back nearly two decades, and is exemplified by a US Congressional hearing that was held under the headline “China in Africa: The New Colonialism?” In the same year, the US business magazine Forbes claimed the purpose of China’s involvement in Africa is “to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did… except worse.”

Certainly there are reasons to criticise the activities of Chinese firms in Africa, but to claim that China is exercising colonial power within the continent — drawing a direct equivalence to Western colonialism and imperialism — is empirically incorrect, stretches these terms into meaninglessness, and amounts to denying the violence of actually-existing colonialism.

What is colonial power?

First, let us consider the stakes of the accusation. What constitutes colonial and neocolonial power?

European colonialism was predicated on invasion and military occupation, forced dispossession, and systematic violence, including policy-induced famines, concentration camps, and genocide. In Africa alone, the British, Germans, French, Belgians and Italians all perpetrated genocidal crimes, in separate instances. German colonisers exterminated the majority of the Herero and Nama population in Namibia. Belgian colonisers killed some 10 million people in the Congo.

Africans achieved political independence in the middle of the 20th century, but the core states have continued to exercise coercive power on the continent in the decades since. The US currently has 58 active military bases in Africa. The US has intervened in many national elections, distorting the democratic process in favour of US interests, and has conducted some 20 regime-change operations. The US has imposed economic sanctions on most African countries (all except for 9).

France, for its part, controls the currency of 14 West African countries, and has tens of thousands of troops stationed in its former African colonies. France has a longstanding record of rigging African elections and propping up dictators, and has collaborated in assassinations against several political leaders in Africa since formal decolonisation. As for the UK, it has invaded nearly every African country (except for 5), and currently maintains 18 military bases on the continent.

Western states have orchestrated coups against dozens of progressive governments across the global South. In Africa, this includes Patrice Lumumba in the DRC, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, among many others, all of whom were replaced by right-wing dictatorships or juntas more willing to serve Western interests. Western states also actively supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Neocolonial power is also exerted through international financial institutions. In the IMF and World Bank, the US holds veto power over all major decisions and the core states control the majority of the vote. They have used this power to impose structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) across the global South, forcibly reorganizing Southern production away from local human needs and instead toward exports to the core in subordinated positions within global commodity chains. In Africa, SAPs caused decades of economic recession and de-development in order to ensure that African resources remain cheaply available to the West.

Nothing that China has done in Africa comes anywhere close to any of this. The moral and material difference is vast. China does not maintain military occupations in Africa. It does not perform regime-change operations, assassinations and coups. It does not control African currencies. It does not impose sanctions or structural adjustment programmes on African economies. China has not perpetrated genocide in Africa. It has never invaded an African country.

Indeed, China has not invaded any country anywhere in the past 46 years. During this same period, we have watched Western states invade and bomb a long list of global South countries, with spectacular violence, including seven countries in 2025 alone.

To equate China’s activities in Africa to European colonialism and contemporary Western imperialism is not only empirically incorrect, it trivialises the extraordinary violence of the latter. It is effectively a form of colonial denialism.

Assessing the allegations

Claims of China’s “colonialism” in Africa hinge on three main allegations. The first is that Chinese firms perpetrate labour abuses and cause social and environmental conflicts in Africa. The second is that China dominates extractive industries in Africa. The third is that China puts African countries in “debt traps”.

To the first claim: yes China has capitalist firms operating in Africa, which exploit workers. But this is how all capitalist firms operate, regardless of where they are headquartered. A recent study on Angola and Ethiopia found no systematic difference in the wages paid by Chinese firms compared to Western firms. If exploitative behaviour by capitalist firms becomes the definition of "colonialism", then the term is stripped of all analytical value. We may as well say that Indonesian or Brazilian firms operating in Africa are colonial, but then the term clearly loses all meaning.

As for Chinese firms causing conflicts, a recent study on Chinese mining firms operating abroad found they do not create more conflict than other foreign-owned firms. In fact, a study of over 3,300 environmental justice conflicts around the world found that, where foreign-owned companies are driving conflicts in Africa and the rest of the global South, these companies were overwhelmingly headquartered in the West rather than China. In the same database (the Environmental Justice Atlas), French firms are responsible for 50x more environmental conflicts in Africa than Chinese firms on a per capita basis.

To the second claim, about resource extraction: the narrative that China dominates Africa’s extractive industries is not supported by evidence. In 2022, 72% of mining exploration funds focused on Africa were owned by Canadian, Australian, and British companies, with only 3% from China. Data from 2018 shows that Chinese companies controlled less than 7% of the total value of African mine production — less than half of the value controlled by a single British multinational, Anglo American.

Zooming in on fossil fuels, Western companies’ plans for expanding oil and gas extraction in Africa outstrip those of Chinese companies by a factor of nine. Of the 23 largest institutional investors in fossil fuel expansion in Africa, 92% of investments are held by the West; meanwhile 74% of expansion financing is provided by Western banks. These figures indicate it is the West that overwhelmingly controls and profits from the extraction of fossil fuels from Africa.

The DRC provides an interesting case. In 2008, Chinese firms signed a deal with the DRC to undertake infrastructure development in exchange for minerals worth up to $50 billion over 25 years. Western institutions represented this as “Chinese colonialism”. Later, in 2025, the US signed a deal with the DRC to obtain $2 trillion in mineral rights in exchange for ending attacks by Rwandan-backed militias against the DRC; attacks that the US had allegedly been supporting. The US deal is 40x larger than the China deal. But Western institutions do not accuse the US of colonialism; on the contrary, they have tended to go with the narrative of a “peace agreement”.

Finally, to the question of “debt traps”. Existing data shows that only 12% of Africa’s external debt is owed to China, whereas 35% — three times more — is owed to private Western creditors, and Africa’s debts to Western creditors carry double the interest compared to its debts with China.

A comprehensive study of China’s loans to Africa during the period 2000-2019 found that China never seized assets and never used courts to enforce payments. Furthermore, during the Covid pandemic, China suspended a substantially larger volume of debts owed by lower-income countries than Western creditors did.

Perhaps most importantly, China does not attach structural adjustment conditions to finance. By contrast, Western creditors have a record of leveraging structural adjustment programmes to force African governments to sell off public assets.

China in world-system perspective

It is important to maintain perspective here. Imperial power means the US and its allies can and regularly do destroy entire states halfway across the world, violating international law with impunity. They can and do bomb any individual or movement they don’t like, anywhere on the planet, for any reason. They can and do impose crushing sanctions, killing millions of people and bending governments to their will.

China simply does not project this kind of power. It is a semi-peripheral economy, with a GDP per capita that is 80% less than that of the core, equal to that of the Latin American average. Its military spending per capita is 40% less than the world average, and 1/20th that of the USA. China can resist the dictates of the core states to some extent, but it cannot and does not impose its will on the rest of the world as the core states do.

None of this is to say that Chinese firms do not exploit workers and resources in Africa. But this cannot be described as colonial or imperial power without rendering these terms analytically meaningless, and denying the violence of actually-existing colonialism.

Semi-peripheral countries like China play an intermediating role in the capitalist world-system. They provide cheap manufactured goods to the core in highly-competitive industries with razor thin profit margins. Capitalists operating in these industries are under pressure to obtain material inputs as cheaply as possible, which drives them to exploit resources in the periphery (like Africa), where imperialist interventions by the core states have weakened governments and cheapened labour and resources.

Within this system, the core extracts value from the semi-periphery — including from China — as well as from the periphery via the semi-periphery. The behaviour of semi-peripheral capitalists in the periphery must be understood primarily as a function of the imperialist world-system rather than as an expression of imperialism itself.

I hope you are enjoying the new year. I’m writing to share a selection of highlights from research we published in 2025, on capitalism, imperialism, post-growth and ecosocialist futures. All this work is open access, and free PDFs are available via the link at the end.

1) Post-growth: the science of well-being within planetary boundaries.
Joining together with Kate Raworth, Julia Steinberger, Giorgos Kallis and other leading scholars in the field, we present this exciting review of key questions and recent breakthroughs in post-growth research. The Lancet Planetary Health.

2) How popular is ecosocialist transformation?
We assessed public backing for ecosocialist transformation in the UK and US, and found it enjoys strong majority support in both countries: 72% in the US and 82% in the UK. We also tested how support is affected by different labels, like “degrowth”, “ecosocialism”, and “well-being economy”. It’s in The Lancet Planetary Health, and I wrote a brief summary on Substack here.

3) Who benefits from growth in consumption of global resources?
In this study we found that capitalist growth in the world economy misallocates resources toward countries that already have more than enough, dramatically exacerbating ecological pressures, while 50% of countries suffer from too little resource use to meet basic needs. A fairer allocation of resources in the world-system can enable good lives for all within planetary boundaries. The Lancet Planetary Health.

4) A progressive framework for green industrial policy.
Existing green industrial policy approaches are limited by capitalist logic and incapable of delivering an ecological civilization. We developed a new progressive framework for green industrial policy that can enable us to (a) scale down ecologically harmful industries; (b) organise production more directly around human needs and public benefit; (c) work toward global justice. New Political Economy.

5) Unequal exchange in the global agri-food system.
We found that global agricultural production is increasingly performed in the global South, but global food-system incomes are increasingly captured by post-farm activities in the global North. This dynamic suggests that Northern firms are appropriating value from Southern land and workers. Global Food Security.

6) Plundering Africa.
In this brief study we show that as the imperial powers imposed structural adjustment programmes on African countries, Africans were forced to consume less while their surplus resources were transferred out to the capitalist world economy effectively for free. Review of African Political Economy.

7) Ecomodernism, green growth and the imperial arrangement.
In this piece we describe how ecomodernist visions and “green growth” scenarios rely on fundamentally imperialist assumptions in order to maintain capital accumulation and needlessly high resource use in the global North, while reconciling this with ecological objectives. To overcome this contradiction requires ecosocialist pathways. Journal of Labour and Society.

8) On debt repudiation in the global South.
Debt crises continue to mount across the developing world. But asking for debt “forgiveness” is a dead end. The only way to overcome the imperialism of the debt system is to undertake collective debt repudiation, as part of a broader strategy to increase economic sovereignty. British Medical Journal.

9) Post-growth industrial policy for Europe.
Here we show that Europe’s new industrial policy is inadequate to address the social and ecological crises that Europe faces. We argue that these contradictions can be solved by integrating ecosocialist and post-growth insights, to align production with social well-being and planetary boundaries. Globalizations.

10) Why is the West warmongering against China?
Turning to short-form writing, here we argue that Western aggression toward China is due to the fact that China’s development (specifically, technological innovation and the rise in wages) is pinching Western profits and undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. AJE.

11) Climate socialism.
Here we argue that the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, because the capitalist law of value prevents us from scaling down damaging industries and increasing investment in green transition. This inertia can be overcome through socialist policy, which can enable us to achieve rapid decarbonisation. Tribune.

12) The staggering death toll of Western sanctions.
The US and EU use sanctions as an instrument of imperial power, to strangle and even destroy global South governments that seek to chart a path toward meaningful sovereignty. We report on recent research finding that Western unilateral sanctions have caused a staggering 38 million excess deaths since 1970. AJE.

13) New data on global poverty.
Has extreme poverty really plunged since the 1980s? New data on the basic needs poverty line (BNPL) allows us to measure poverty more accurately. This evidence shows global extreme poverty increased dramatically during the period of neoliberal reform in the 1990s. Across the whole period from 1980 to 2011 (the final year of this data), the poverty rate declined by only 6 percentage points, while the number of people living in extreme poverty increased from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion. The Conversation.

14) On ecological imperialism.
One of the most damaging myths about the global ecological crisis is that humans as such are responsible for it. In reality, the crisis is being driven mostly by the states and corporations of the imperial core, primarily to the benefit of their elites. This piece provides a brief summary of recent data on atmospheric colonisation and resource appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange. Tricontinental.

15) Degrowth politics and strategy.
Finally, there is a debate occurring within the degrowth community about politics and strategy. Here I argue that socialism, and socialist political movements, are essential to removing the capitalist class from power over investment and production, in order to achieve the transformations that degrowth advocates call for. Degrowth.info.


As always, thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who contributed to or led this research, and thanks to all of you who have shared the journey with us!

Free PDFs of all our research are available here.

Best wishes for 2026,

Jason

How popular is ecosocialist transformation? We explored this question in a new study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health together with colleagues at the London School of Economics.

We surveyed more than 5,000 people in the UK and US, using representative samples and two separate study designs. We presented people with a full proposal for eco-socialist transformation, which included the following:

• scaling down damaging and unnecessary production and consumption

• cutting the purchasing power of the rich, and reducing inequality

• establishing universal public services and a public job guarantee to reorganise production around needs

• democratising control over finance and the means of production

• ending imperialist appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange

We found that this vision enjoys strong majority support in both countries. In the US, 72% of people supported it, and in the UK support was even higher at 82%. These are striking results, and confirm other studies showing popular support for many of the principles and policies associated with ecosocialism.

Next, we wanted to understand how people respond to various labels that may be used to describe this transformation, so we presented people with standalone words including “degrowth”, “ecosocialism”, and “well-being economy”, without any description. Here I will report results for the UK, but the US results are similar.

We found that “degrowth” was supported by 20-26%, depending on the study, but also attracted a lot of opposition (16-34%).

“Ecosocialism” had higher support, at 36-58%, and much lower opposition (11-16%).

“Well-being economy” had even higher support (51-81%) and very minimal opposition (more on this later).

In our final step, we gave people the full proposal but this time together with the various different labels. This enabled us to understand whether and how the use of different labels affects people’s support. We found that support was high regardless of the label, with strong majorities: 67-72% in the US, and 74-84% in the UK.

So what can we make of all this? For me, here are the main takeaways:

First, the transformative vision and policies advanced by ecosocialism are popular and can form the basis of a winning political campaign. The common notion that these ideas are too “radical” and cannot gain support, is clearly wrong. People want these things, and are likely to support political leaders who can credibly promise to deliver them. The main obstacle to transformation is not popular will, but the capitalist class that currently holds predominant power over production and within political institutions.

Second, some reflections on the word “degrowth”, which was the main focus of this study. Our results show that much of the opposition to (or neutrality toward) degrowth is due to misunderstanding of the word rather than rejection of the underlying principles and policies.

Degrowth is a crucial analytical and scientific term and we need it for these purposes. Advocates also note that it is a “missile word” useful for provoking people to rethink long-held assumptions. This can be powerful. But the word may be less useful as a public-facing political slogan, as — depending on the context — it is often misunderstood and can inspire negative reactions. Unless, that is, you have the capacity to educate people about what the term means and what such a transformation would entail.

Third, the term ecosocialism is substantially more popular and can create broader political support. We were surprised to find that up to 58% of people in both the UK and US were willing to support ecosocialism even when just presented with the word alone. We didn’t test people’s reactions to related terms, like “socialism” or “democratic socialism” or “communism”, but this would be interesting to do.

What about “well-being economy”? It is popular and obviously useful in certain contexts, but it is also apolitical and can easily be co-opted and neutralised. To me it’s important to be clear about the political antagonism that is at stake: the transformation requires removing the capitalist class from control over finance and the means of production. This is a class war. Ecosocialism captures this element, but other terms may work just as well or better toward this end.

Ultimately, what this study shows is that we don’t necessarily need to identify and unite behind a single term. What matters is the broader vision, the political substance, and the concrete policies we advance.

And of course it is important to remember that the struggle does not consist in selecting the right terminology and framing. It consists in building power. That is the main objective and must remain front and centre.

The concept of delinking has gained traction recently among some political movements in the global South, including with an international conference in Mexico on this topic that took place last month.

What is delinking, and how can it be achieved?

Delinking was best described by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin. He started from the observation that the capitalist world economy is characterised by a stark division of labour between the imperial core (often glossed as the global North) and the periphery (the global South).

In this system, the core states seek to monopolise the most profitable forms of production and establish control over global commodity chains, while preventing sovereign development in the periphery to maintain it as a subordinate supplier of cheap labour. Southern labour and resources are roped into producing things like sweatshop goods and plantation commodities for the core, at compressed market prices, rather than producing for local human needs and national development.

Amin pointed out that this system is characterised by large core-periphery price disparities and therefore unequal exchange in international trade. The South is made dependent on imports of technologies and producer goods from the core at monopoly prices, and to pay for this they have to export massive quantities of artificially cheapened commodities and manufactured goods, thus generating a net-transfer of value from the periphery to the core. This enriches the core but drains the periphery of resources necessary for development.

This system produces and perpetuates poverty and underdevelopment in the South. There is nothing inevitable about poverty; it is an effect of imperialist dynamics in the world economy. The global South has extraordinary productive capacities; massive labour power, land, factories and resources. The problem is they do not have sovereign control over production.

To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:

1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.

2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.

How can delinking be achieved in the 21^st century? Some basic principles include the following:

A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.

These options are increasingly available to Southern countries now because of China. China has broken many of the core’s technological monopolies and provides an alternative source from which Southern states can obtain imports, on much fairer terms. (Indeed this is one of the main reasons for the core’s increasingly aggressive posture toward China). China’s BRI has also created infrastructure that can enable greater South-South trade.

A second step is to use industrial policy and planning to overcome the inertia of capital and guide investment and production toward developing a sovereign industrial base, escaping from subordinate positions in global commodity chains, and building the infrastructure necessary to meet human needs.

Toward this end, governments can nationalise key resource deposits and the major export industries to gain public control over foreign currency earnings, while taxing the foreign currency earnings of private exporters. This way foreign currency can be used strategically, to focus on purchasing the technologies and producer goods that are most necessary for overcoming dependencies and developing sovereign national industries.

Finally, public finance can be leveraged for public works. Southern states that issue their own national currency can use it to fund any project that can be financed in that currency, without needing to rely on foreign capital. They can establish a public job guarantee to train and employ people in necessary activities such as building housing, sanitation systems, schools and hospitals, without waiting for capital to decide these are worth doing.

Of course, this only scratches the surface. Every country faces its own unique challenges, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for delinking. But steps like these can help enable Southern countries to reclaim their productive capacities and escape from dynamics of unequal exchange.

Some of these moves may be prevented by IMF structural adjustment programmes or conditions imposed by foreign creditors, which generally seek to preclude Southern states from using industrial and fiscal policy. If so, governments may need to default on relevant external debts, and – as Thomas Sankara argued – they should do this collectively wherever possible, so as to maximise their bargaining power.

Of course, there will be backlash. The core states will impose higher borrowing costs and possibly sanctions. But these pressures can be mitigated precisely to the extent that governments are able to reduce their dependence on imports from the core. Increased public control over foreign currency, together with capital controls, can help prevent any balance of payments crisis. And new Southern institutions like the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank may provide alternative sources of finance.

A final consideration is defense. We cannot underestimate the extent to which the core states are willing to use violence, even genocidal violence, against any national liberation project, in order to maintain peripheral subordination. We have seen this play out many times in the past decades. Therefore it is necessary to establish regional defense alliances wherever possible, as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have done with the Alliance of Sahel States.

A process of delinking along these lines can be extremely powerful. It can enable Southern states to escape imperialist exploitation, overcome underdevelopment, meet human needs, and undertake ecological transition. Freedom and dignity for the global majority requires a process of delinking. This will also be the process by which the core-periphery structure of the world economy will ultimately be dismantled and a non-polar world can be established.

*For more on what a delinking programme can look like, see: “Proposals for unilateral decolonization and economic sovereignty”

Data from the World Bank suggests that extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the past four decades, from 47% of the world’s population in 1981 to around 10% today.

This narrative is based on the World Bank’s method of calculating the share of people who live on less than US$3 per day in 2021 prices. This is adjusted for general price differences between countries (what’s known as purchasing power parity, or PPP).

But a growing body of literature argues that the World Bank’s PPP-based method has a major empirical limitation. The problem is that it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs in any given context. Having more than US$3 PPP does not guarantee that a person can afford the specific goods and services that are necessary for survival in a particular location.

In recent years, scholars have developed what they argue is a more accurate method for measuring extreme poverty. This is done by comparing people’s incomes to the prices of essential goods (specifically food, shelter, clothing and fuel) in each country.

This approach is known as the “basic needs poverty line” (BNPL), and it more closely reflects what the original concept of extreme poverty was intended to measure. There is robust data from household consumption surveys and consumer prices covering the period from 1980-2011.

The BNPL data indicates that the story of global poverty over the past few decades is more complex – and troubling – than the World Bank narrative suggests.

This data indicates that between 1980 and 2011, the global extreme poverty rate declined by only six percentage points, from 23% to 17%. During the same period, the number of people in extreme poverty actually increased, from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion.

What’s more, the alleviation of poverty has not been steady. In the 1980s and 1990s, an additional one billion people were thrown into extreme poverty. This occurred during the period when market reforms were implemented across most of the global south (developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America), often under pressure from western-controlled financial institutions. There was improvement throughout the 2000s, but progress has ultimately been slow and shallow.

Rising food insecurity

Robust BNPL data does not exist after 2011. However, data from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) surveys on food insecurity shows that the proportion of the world population without reliable access to food increased steadily during the past decade or so, going from 21% in 2014 to 30% in 2022.

This includes cases of severe food insecurity, which is associated with prolonged periods of hunger. The share of the world population suffering in this way has increased from 7.7% to 11.3%.

Given that secure access to food is central to the BNPL method, we may assume that post-2011 poverty trends have probably not improved much, if at all.

This has important implications for the United Nations’ millennium development goals. The first of these set out to halve the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. But the data on basic-needs poverty and food insecurity indicates that this goal was probably not achieved.

Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but a sign of severe dislocation. Data on real wages since the 15th century indicates that, under normal conditions, across different societies and eras, people are generally able to meet their subsistence needs except during periods of severe social displacement.

This includes crises like famine and war, and the institutionalised denial of resources to marginalised people, particularly under European colonialism.

What’s more, the BNPL data shows that many countries have achieved very low levels of extreme poverty, even where GDP per capita is not high. They have done this by using strategies such as public provisioning and price controls for basic essentials.

This is consistent with previous research that found that these strategies can enable better social outcomes at any level of income.

In fact, research shows that the world economy already has enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Indeed it is possible not only to eliminate extreme poverty, but also to eliminate deprivation at much higher thresholds.

With these levels of production, we could ensure universal access to healthcare, education, modern housing, sanitation systems, electricity, clean cooking stoves, refrigeration, mobile phones, internet, computers, transport, household appliances and other necessities for decent living standards, for more than eight billion people.

The fact that poverty persists at such high levels today indicates that severe dislocation is institutionalised in the world economy – and that markets have failed to meet the basic needs of much of humanity.

Ending extreme poverty is the first objective of the UN’s sustainable development goals. The world economy has the resources and productive capacity to realise this goal – and more. But achieving it will require organising production to guarantee universal access to the specific goods and services that people need to live decent lives.

Originally published in The Conversation. For more data visualisations on global poverty see The Global Inequality Project.

A wide range of public opinion surveys and studies over the past years have demonstrated that people in China tend to express strikingly strong support for their government and their political-economic system, much higher than in most other countries.

For instance, the World Values Survey consistently shows that over 90% of people in China report “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the national government. In 2018, the most recent wave, trust was at 94.6%, one of the highest levels in the world. This result is supported by the Asian Barometer Survey, which in 2015 found 86.7% of respondents in China had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the national government.

Similarly, Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance has conducted regular surveys on public opinion in China since 2003. It finds that, in the most recent year of data, satisfaction with the national government stood at 93%, having generally increased over time. Satisfaction with provincial governments was also high at 82%.

Next, the Danish NGO Alliance for Democracies publishes data on people’s perceptions of their political systems in over 50 countries. According to the most recent report (2024), people in China have positive views of their political system, with 91% saying that the government serves the interests of most people (rather than a small group), and 85% saying all people enjoy equal rights before the law, much higher than in the US, France and Britain.

Finally, a recent study published in the journal Political Psychology asked people in 42 countries whether they think their system is fair and just. They used the following questions: “In general, I find society to be fair”, “In general my country’s political system operates as it should”, “Everyone in my country has a fair shot at wealth and happiness”, and “My country’s society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve.” The results show that people in China are more likely to agree with these statements than any other country in the set.

These are all remarkable results. But skeptics have questioned the data, saying that respondents may overstate support for their government if they live in a system where they are likely to fear repression for expressing political dissent. In behavioural psychology, this is known as “strategic misreporting”. The Alliance for Democracies study is designed to avoid this bias, but other studies may be more vulnerable.

So, are the skeptics right?

Researchers have responded by assessing this question empirically. One way to exclude bias from strategic misreporting is to use indirect questioning techniques called “list experiments” that guarantee people cannot be associated with their responses. This approach is used in cases where people may self-censor when asked about socially or politically sensitive topics. A meta-analysis found that when this method is used, people tend to report lower levels of support for government compared to direct questioning.

Several list experiment studies have been conducted in China. Wenfang Tang (2016) embedded this approach in a World Values Survey for 2013 and found slightly lower levels of trust in national government (by -4 percentage points). If this discrepancy holds for the 2018 World Value Survey results, it would imply that trust in national government is still high at 90%.

However, some limitations in that study inspired researchers to carry out a series of more robust list experiment studies. Using more advanced methods, Li, Shi, and Zhu (2018) found that trust in national leaders is 62%. Robinson and Tannenberg (2019) found that confidence in national government is 66%. Nicholson and Huang (2022) found 77% support for central government and 67% support for local government. Finally, Carter, Carter and Schick (2024) found that 65-70% of people support Xi Jinping, and about 65% agree the government works for the people and is responsive.

While the list experiment results are lower than what we see in direct questioning, they still indicate high levels of popular support, at around 62-77%. This is much higher than the levels of support for government we see in the United States (33%), France (31%) and Britain (29%), according to the most recent World Value Survey results. And it is higher even than what we see in the Scandinavian countries, which otherwise enjoy among the highest results in the world: Denmark (39%), Finland (42%), Norway (59%), Sweden (51%).

List experiments have their own problems, however: researchers have found that because the questioning technique is more complicated, it introduces unintended reporting errors that may even outstrip errors from strategic misreporting. In other words, it may be that simpler direct questioning methods produce more accurate results.

An alternative technique to avoid strategic misreporting is to use Implicit Association Tests, assessing people’s implicit trust in government rather than relying on explicit statements. Implementing this approach in a study on China, Huang, Intawan and Nicholson (2022) find that implicit trust levels are similar to explicit trust, indicating that high reported trust in China is not due to political fear or social desirability. They conclude: “the Chinese public’s trust in its government is largely genuine… both their implicit and explicit responses about government are largely trustful.”

Their paper also describes interesting results of other relevant studies:

“Lei and Lu (2017) randomly assigned participants to either a standard face-to-face interview (control) or a treatment wherein participants were told the survey was sponsored by the CPC, the expectation being that people would be less forthcoming in expressing distrust in the latter case. Yet participants in the CPC treatment did not exhibit a significantly higher non-response rate nor report higher trust in China’s political system than participants in the (normal interviewer) control condition.”

And, “Drawing on affect transfer theory, Stockmann, Esarey and Zhang (2018) found no evidence that priming participants with the central government produced a fearful response in evaluations of a non-political advertisement.”

In other words, people in China do not seem to self-censor based on fear. The authors conclude: “Across a variety of studies using different methodologies, a good deal of evidence suggests that the Chinese people are willing to answer politically sensitive questions in a truthful manner.”

As I am always at pains to point out, none of this is to say that China does not have problems and internal contradictions that must be overcome. It does, just as all countries do. But these studies point to an important reality that we must grapple with: the Chinese people have a much higher regard for their government, and much higher support for their political and economic system, than people in the West tend to assume.

Surveys are conducted to measure this by presenting people with four statements:

•⁠ ⁠“In general, I find society to be fair”
•⁠ ⁠“In general my country's political system operates as it should”
•⁠ ⁠“Everyone in my country has a fair shot at wealth and happiness”
•⁠ ⁠ “My country's society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve”

People are generally asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 7: Completely Disagree —> Disagree —> Somewhat Disagree —> Neutral —> Somewhat Agree —> Agree —> Completely Agree.

A recent study, published last year in the journal Political Psychology, explored survey data for 24,000 people in 42 countries around the world. The results show that, on average, people do not justify the system they live in. The average response across all countries in the sample is 3.2, close to “somewhat disagree”.

When we break this down further, we see that for 26 of the countries, people on average somewhat disagree that their system is fair. This is true for example in Nigeria (2.5), Italy (2.8), and Taiwan (3.4). For 15 of the countries, the average response is on the lower side of the neutral range, including in the UK (3.6) and the US (3.7), with New Zealand (4) being smack in the middle.

There is only one country where the survey results indicate that citizens generally say that the system they live in is fair, and that is China. China has an average score of 4.8, with a 95% confidence interval of 4.7-4.9, indicating “somewhat agree”. Indeed, China has the highest score in the sample by a substantial margin. Notably, there are no countries where the average response is “agree” or “completely agree”, indicating there is much need for improvement across the board.

The results for China may seem surprising, given that China has fairly high income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, seeing only marginal reductions in recent years. On the other hand, there have been dramatic material improvements in most people’s lives over the past decade or two. The wages of manufacturing workers have increased 8-fold since 2005, and the government has taken strong steps to reduce poverty and ensure universal access to good housing, food, healthcare and education. It is reasonable to assume that these changes have impacted on people’s perceptions of their system.

We see similar positive assessments in previous studies - one by Harvard’s Ash Center and one by the Alliance of Democracies - finding that people in China are increasingly satisfied with their government, believe their government is democratic and serves the interests of the people, and believe their government provides equal rights to all before the law, to the point of outperforming the US and most European countries on these measures.

One possible criticism is that people may overstate support for their system if they live in a country where political dissent is repressed. This is known as “strategic misreporting”. But the fact that the Political Psychology study finds low system justification scores in countries known for political repression suggests this is not a problem. If people in any country felt compelled to signal full-throated endorsement of their system out of fear of repression, we would expect to see much higher results, closer to 7. But this is not the case.

In any case, this question has been explored at length in the political psychology literature on China. Researchers have carried out several studies using methods specifically designed to exclude strategic misreporting - such as list experiments and implicit association tests. I have summarized this literature here. Over and over again, these studies confirm that people in China do indeed have high levels of support for their government and their political-economic system.

During the 1970s, there were, on average, about 15 countries under Western unilateral sanctions in any given year. In many cases, these sanctions sought to strangle access to finance and international trade, destabilise industries, and inflame crises to provoke state collapse.

For instance, when the popular socialist Salvador Allende was elected to power in Chile in 1970, the US government imposed brutal sanctions on the country. At a September 1970 meeting at the White House, US President Richard Nixon explained the objective was to “make [Chile’s] economy scream”. The historian Peter Kornbluh describes the sanctions as an “invisible blockade” that cut Chile off from international finance, created social unrest, and paved the way for the US-backed coup that installed the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Since then, the US and Europe have dramatically increased their use of sanctions. During the 1990s and 2000s, an average of 30 countries were under Western unilateral sanctions in any given year. And now, as of the 2020s, it is more than 60 – a strikingly high proportion of the countries of the Global South.

Sanctions often have a huge human toll. Scholars have demonstrated this in several well-known cases, such as the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that led to widespread malnutrition, lack of clean water, and shortages of medicine and electricity. More recently, US economic warfare against Venezuela has resulted in a severe economic crisis, with one study estimating that sanctions caused 40,000 excess deaths in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.

Until now, researchers have sought to understand the human toll of sanctions on a case-by-case basis. This is difficult work and can only ever give us a partial picture. But that has changed with new research published this year in The Lancet Global Health, which gives us a global view for the first time. Led by the economist Francisco Rodriguez at the University of Denver, the study calculates the total number of excess deaths associated with international sanctions from 1970 to 2021.

The results are staggering. In their central estimate, the authors find that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and EU since 1970 are associated with 38 million deaths. In some years, during the 1990s, more than a million people were killed. In 2021, the most recent year of data, sanctions caused more than 800,000 deaths.

According to these results, several times more people are killed by sanctions each year than are killed as direct casualties of war. More than half of the victims are children and the elderly, people who are most vulnerable to malnutrition. The study finds that, since 2012 alone, sanctions have killed more than one million children.

Hunger and deprivation are not an accidental by-product of Western sanctions; they are a key objective. This is clear from a State Department memo written in April 1960, which explains the purpose of US sanctions against Cuba. The memo noted that Fidel Castro – and the revolution more broadly – enjoyed widespread popularity in Cuba. It argued that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” by “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”.

The power of Western sanctions hinges on their control over the world’s reserve currencies (the US dollar and the Euro), their control over international payment systems (SWIFT), and their monopoly over essential technologies (eg satellites, cloud computation, software). If countries in the Global South wish to chart a more independent path towards a multipolar world, they will need to take steps to limit their dependence in these respects and thus insulate themselves from backlash. The recent experience of Russia shows that such an approach can succeed.

Governments can achieve greater independence by building South-South trade and swap lines outside the core currencies, using regional planning to develop necessary technologies, and establishing new payment systems outside Western control. Indeed, several countries are already taking steps in this direction. Importantly, new systems that have been developed in China (eg CIPS for international payments, BeiDou for satellites, Huawei for telecom) now provide other global South countries alternative options that can become a pathway out of Western dependence and the sanctions net.

These steps are necessary for countries that wish to achieve sovereign development, but they are also a moral imperative. We cannot accept a world where half a million people are killed each year to prop up Western hegemony. An international order that relies on this kind of violence must be dismantled and replaced.

*By Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Omer Tayyab, originally published by Al Jazeera English.

Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States toward China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military buildup close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat.

China’s rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it.

The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world-system. Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the “Global North”, depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called “Global South”.

This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. The systematic price disparity between the core and periphery also enables the core to achieve a large net-appropriation of value from the periphery through unequal exchange in international trade.

Ever since the 1980s, when China opened up to Western investment and trade, it has been a crucial part of this arrangement, providing a major source of labour for Western firms – labour that is cheap but also highly skilled and highly productive. For instance, much of Apple’s production relies on Chinese labour. According to research by the economist Donald A Clelland, if Apple had to pay Chinese and East Asian workers at the same rate as a US worker, this would have cost them an additional $572 per iPad in 2011.

But over the past two decades, wages in China have increased quite dramatically. Around 2005 the manufacturing labour cost per hour in China was lower than in India, less than $1 per hour. In the years since, China’s hourly labour costs have increased to over $8 per hour, while India’s are now only about $2 per hour. Indeed, wages in China are now higher than in every other developing country in Asia. This a major, historical development.

This has happened for several key reasons. For one, surplus labour in China has been increasingly absorbed into the wage-labour economy, which has amplified workers’ bargaining power. At the same time, the current leadership of Xi Jinping has expanded the role of the state in China’s economy, strengthening public provisioning systems – including public healthcare and public housing – that have further improved the position of workers.

These are positive changes for China – and specifically for Chinese workers – but they pose a severe problem for Western capital. Higher wages in China impose a constraint on the profits of Western firms which operate there or which depend on Chinese manufacturing for intermediate parts and other key inputs.

The other problem, for the core states, is that the increase in China’s wages and prices is reducing its exposure to unequal exchange. During the low-wage era of the 1990s, China’s export to import ratio with the core was extremely high. In other words, China had to export very large quantities of goods in order to obtain necessary imports. Today this ratio is much lower, representing a dramatic improvement in China’s terms of trade, substantially reducing the core’s ability to appropriate value from China.

Given all this, capitalists in the core states are now desperate to do something to restore their access to cheap labour and resources. One option – increasingly promoted by the Western business press – is to relocate industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are cheaper. But this is costly in terms of lost production, the need to find new staff, and other supply chain disruptions. The other option is to force Chinese wages back down. Hence the attempts by the United States to undermine the Chinese government and destabilise the Chinese economy - including through economic warfare and the constant threat of military escalation.

Ironically, Western governments sometimes justify their opposition to China on the grounds that China’s exports are too cheap. It is often claimed that China “cheats” in international trade, by artificially suppressing the exchange rate for its currency, the renminbi. The problem with this argument, however, is that China abandoned this policy around a decade ago. As the economist Jose Antonio Ocampo noted in 2017, “in recent years, China has rather been making efforts to avoid a depreciation of the renminbi, sacrificing a large amount of reserves. This may imply that, if anything, this currency is now overvalued.” China did eventually permit a devaluation in 2019, when tariffs imposed by the Trump administrated increased pressure on the renminbi. But this was a normal response to a change in market conditions, not an attempt to suppress the renminbi below its market rate.

The United States largely supported the Chinese government in the period when its currency was undervalued, including through loans from the IMF and World Bank. The West turned decisively against China in the mid-2010s, at precisely the moment when the country began to raise its prices and challenge its position as a peripheral supplier of cheap inputs to Western-dominated supply chains.

The second element that’s driving US hostility toward China is technology. Beijing has used industrial policy to prioritise technological development in strategic sectors over the past decade, and has achieved remarkable progress. It now has the world’s largest high-speed rail network, manufactures its own commercial aircraft, leads the world on renewable energy technology and electric vehicles, and enjoys advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, artificial intelligence, etc. The tech news coming out of China has been dizzying. These are achievements that we only expect from high-income countries, and China is doing it with almost 80 percent less GDP per capita than the average “advanced economy”. It is unprecedented.

This poses a problem for the core states because one of the main pillars of the imperial arrangement is that they need to maintain a monopoly over necessary technologies like capital goods, medicines, computers, aircraft and so on. This forces the “Global South” into a position of dependency, so they are forced to export large quantities of their cheapened resources in order to obtain these necessary technologies. This is what sustains the core’s net-appropriation through unequal exchange

China’s technological development is now breaking Western monopolies, and may give other developing countries alternative suppliers for necessary goods at more affordable prices. This poses a fundamental challenge to the imperial arrangement and unequal exchange.

The US has responded by imposing sanctions designed to cripple China’s technological development. So far this has not worked; if anything, it has increased incentives for China to develop sovereign technological capacities. With this weapon mostly neutralised, the US wants to resort to warmongering, the main objective of which would be to destroy China’s industrial base, and divert China’s investment capital and productive capacities toward defence. The US wants to go to war with China not because China poses some kind of military threat to the American people, but because Chinese development undermines the interests of imperial capital.

Western claims about China posing some kind of military threat are pure propaganda. The material facts tell a fundamentally different story. In fact, China’s military spending per capita is less than the global average, and 1/10th that of the US alone. Yes, China has a big population, but even in absolute terms, the US-aligned military bloc spends over seven times more on military power than China does. The US controls eight nuclear weapons for every one that China has.

China may have the power to prevent the US from imposing its will on it, but it does not have the power to impose its will on the rest of the world in the way that the core states do. The narrative that China poses some kind of military threat is wildly overblown.

In fact, the opposite is true. The US has hundreds of military bases and facilities around the world. A significant number of them are stationed near China – in Japan and South Korea. By contrast, China has only one foreign military base, in Djibouti, and zero military bases near US borders.

Furthermore, China has not fired a single bullet in international warfare in over 40 years, while during this time the US has invaded, bombed or carried out regime-change operations in over a dozen Global South countries. If there is any state that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the US.

The real reason for Western warmongering is because China is achieving sovereign development and this is undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. The West will not let global economic power slip from its hands so easily.

*By Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, originally published by Al Jazeera English.

Why does the US support Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people, even in the face of overwhelming international condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the very frameworks of human rights and international law that it pretends to uphold?

People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections, and other forms of Israeli political intervention in the US. That’s a real force and cannot be ignored, but the reality is that the US ruling class broadly supports Israel’s actions — with bipartisan consensus — because they see this as aligned with the interests of US capitalism. And most other Western governments (Britain, Germany, etc.) hold the same position for much the same reason.

The important thing to understand is that the capitalist economy is a world-system, where growth and accumulation in the imperial core (e.g, the US and Western Europe) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap labour and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, or the global South. Western states and firms need Southern states to remain subordinated suppliers of cheap labour, raw materials and consumer goods within global commodity chains.

In order to maintain this arrangement, the core states must find ways to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Sovereign development means Southerners begin to escape their subordination, produce more for themselves, increase their wages, and consume their own output. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains their consumption and makes it more difficult for them to realise profits.

This is the key point: economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states must constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, because they saw this as a way to have a military proxy in the Middle East, where they could stage counter-insurgency operations against the Arab socialist movements and national liberation struggles that were popular at that time. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in the region: the liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it.

Israel has been instrumental in assassinating liberation leaders in the Arab region, and interfering in the political processes of the Arab countries to prevent nationalist and socialist parties from coming to power. It has a long history of attacking regional states - Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, etc - destabilizing them and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending instead of industrial development. This is in full alignment with US strategy.

Not only in the Middle East: Israel has a long history of providing military and intelligence support to right-wing regimes around the world. For example, Israel armed and supported Argentina’s US-backed military junta, which murdered 30,000 socialists and political dissidents. And Israel armed and assisted the US-backed genocide in Guatemala, training military cadres in techniques of torture and ethnic cleansing.

The US supports Israel for the exact same reasons that they have backed the plotters of assassinations and coups against liberation leaders across the global South since the 1950s, which deposed Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran), Patrice Lumumba (DRC), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Salvador Allende (Chile), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), Sukarno (Indonesia), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), etc. They do it for the same reason they invaded Vietnam, destroyed Libya, and imposed sanctions on Cuba. It is the same pattern with the same objectives.

This is why Israel is so despised around the world. Not only because Israel is hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine, but because it intervenes everywhere to crush popular movements and create chaos and instability, and this is intolerable.

So Israel is not an "ally" of the US in the conventional sense of the term. It is a proxy force — an attack dog. This relationship is particularly useful to the US because it allows them to have a degree of distance from their actions, and plausible deniability. The US can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with them, and then claim it’s not responsible for the violence and destruction and war crimes that Israel perpetrates in the region.

The core states used South Africa in the same way. The key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa — also against overwhelming international condemnation — was because it served as a highly militarized Western colonial outpost that was geared up to run counter-insurgency operations not only within South Africa (against the African National Congress and the Communist Party; remember the US listed Mandela as a “terrorist” until 2008), but also in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the DRC, etc., causing immense violence and chaos.

The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but the US and its main allies reject this. Why? Because Palestinian liberation would remove a key US proxy, and would open the way to liberation movements elsewhere in the region. A liberated Palestine means a liberated Middle East. And a liberated Middle East — at the hinge of Africa, Asia and Europe — is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital.

So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are willing to back obscene violence in Gaza, and shred the liberal values they claim to believe in — resulting in breathtaking displays of hypocrisy — because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony. This is US policy. All the handwringing by Biden in the previous administration, the discourse about “too many innocent lives lost”, was all theatre designed to defuse our outrage. Under Trump that veneer of concern is gone.

You cannot appeal to imperial power in moral terms. The only way the US will stop arming, funding and propping up the Zionist regime is when it becomes too costly for them to do so. This will come down to the strength of regional political and military opposition; the strength of the Hague Group and the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions; and the strength of punitive measures that can be applied by international courts.

The plain fact is that the climate crisis cannot be addressed within capitalism. This may be difficult for some to come to terms with, but it is vital that we understand this fact and develop our strategies accordingly, otherwise we are headed for certain failure. And on this issue, failure is not an option.

First, what do I mean by capitalism? People often assume that capitalism is defined by businesses, markets and trade. But these things were around for thousands of years before capitalism and have taken many different forms. In reality, the main thing that distinguishes capitalism is that it is fundamentally undemocratic.

This may seem strange to say because obviously many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect government leaders from time to time, even if we acknowledge that these systems are corrupt and inadequate. But when it comes to the economy, the system of production, not even a pretence of democracy is allowed to enter. Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big banks, the major corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They determine what to produce, how to use our labour and our planet’s resources, and who should benefit.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or improve society, much less to achieve any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is known as the “capitalist law of value”: capital only invests in producing what is profitable to capital.

This poses very severe problems for the energy transition. We know we must reduce fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy. For ages, economists told us that once renewables became cheaper than fossil fuels, the transition would occur automatically. But it’s not happening. Why? Because while renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, fossil fuels are around 3 times more profitable. This is because renewables have a low barrier to entry and are highly competitive (which is great for low prices!), while fossil fuels are more conducive to market control and monopoly pricing.

So capital keeps producing fossil fuels, and invests far too little in renewables, even while the world burns around us. We are hostage to this deadly logic. And it’s not only energy where this problem arises. We also need to build public transit, insulate buildings, innovate green technologies, regenerate ecosystems, and develop agroecology. These things are essential to the transition, and they are simple to do, but capital does not invest in such activities because they are not sufficiently profitable. Under capitalism, we suffer critical shortages of existentially necessary things that could otherwise easily be delivered.

The writing is on the wall. Over the past two years, several major investment firms have abandoned their climate pledges, openly admitting that green transition is not profitable enough for them. This should be a clarifying moment for all of us: capital cannot be trusted to resolve the climate crisis. We are staring failure in the face and careening toward a very bleak future indeed.

There are further challenges. We know that, in order to meet the Paris Agreement goals, high-income countries must reduce total energy use. Some of this can be achieved through efficiency improvements, yes. But it also requires scaling down damaging and unnecessary forms of production – not just fossil fuels, but also things like SUVs, private jets, mansions, fast fashion, industrial beef, advertising, and the practice of planned obsolescence. Scientists have made it clear that if we want to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization, this has to be on the table.

This approach can have powerful benefits. Not only does it reduce energy use and make decarbonization easier to achieve, it also liberates productive capacities – labour and factories – which can be remobilized to accelerate socially and ecologically necessary production. But here too, we face a wall: capital will not voluntarily degrow profitable forms of production. And all of these things – the SUVs, the industrial beef, etc – are highly profitable, so we are forced to keep producing them.

Even if capital was willing to reduce unnecessary production, in our current system — where we lack any mechanism that could redirect labour toward socially-necessary activities — this would cause unemployment and social crisis, perpetuating the insecurities that already plague people under capitalism. So we’re trapped.

Think of it this way. The climate crisis is 100% driven by the system of production. It is about who controls production and what they produce. People say climate is a complex problem and difficult to solve, but this is false. It is in fact extremely easy. We know exactly what we need to do, and we have more than enough capacity to do it. The problem is that we are subject to the capitalist law of value, and thus prevented from taking these obviously necessary steps.

So what is the antidote to capitalism? Economic democracy. With democratic control over our productive capacities we can stop climate breakdown in short order. We can overcome the capitalist law of value, and organize production around social and ecological objectives.

This can be achieved with straightforward policies. We need credit guidance to reduce investment in damaging industries. We need public finance, industrial policy, and nationalization of key industries to do necessary production regardless of profits. We need a public job guarantee and public works to remobilize our capacities around urgent objectives, prevent involuntary unemployment, and abolish economic insecurity. We need universal services to ensure everyone has access to the resources needed for a good life. And we need to democratize private firms — workplace democracy! — so businesses can focus on meeting social and ecological needs rather than on maximizing profits.

The good news is that these policies are highly popular, and can form the basis of a winning political platform. Democratic socialism, where we extend the principle of democracy into the realm of production, is a viable path — indeed the only path — to a safe and just future.

The climate movement has so far focused on building awareness and trying to push politicians to take action. But lack of awareness is no longer the problem. And our politicians refuse to take action because they are aligned with the capitalist class and ultimately committed to capitalism. We need a new way forward: build new mass-based political parties that can unite workers and environmentalists in a shared project of transformation, win elections, take power, and deliver on the objectives everyone wants to achieve.

It is common in Western discourse to claim there is a natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Sometimes the two concepts are virtually fused together. I always find this odd because I value democracy, but there is nothing democratic about capitalism.

Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect national leaders every few years, even if we acknowledge that this process is often corrupt and inadequate. But when it comes to the economy, the system of production — which affects our everyday lives and determines the shape and direction of our society — generally not even a pretence of democracy is allowed to enter.

Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big financial firms, the large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources, and what to do with the surplus we generate.

As far as capital is concerned, the purpose of production and surplus reinvestment is not to meet human needs, achieve social progress, or to realise democratically ratified objectives. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit and power — that is the overriding goal. These decisions are made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class. The workers — the people actually doing the production — rarely get any voice at all.

This arrangement is completely undemocratic. In fact, it is literally plutocracy. And when you govern a system like this, it leads to perverse outcomes. We end up with massive overproduction of damaging and less-necessary things like fossil fuels, SUVs and industrial beef (which are highly profitable to capital) but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and affordable housing (because these are less profitable to capital or not profitable at all).

The result is that despite having extraordinary productive capacity, with extremely high levels of output to the point of blowing past planetary boundaries, we nonetheless fail to ensure that everyone has access to basic goods and services. In the United States, the richest country in the world, nearly half the population cannot afford healthcare; in the United Kingdom, 4.3 million children live in poverty; and in the European Union, 95 million people cannot afford decent housing and nutritious food. These are totally artificial scarcities.

It also bears noting that those who control production within this system then leverage their profits to manipulate national elections, through campaign finance and advertising, in support of politicians who will serve their interests. Or through ownership and control over media outlets. Democracy cannot function under these conditions. Indeed, a 2014 study found that the impact of this dynamic on political outcomes in the US means the country more closely resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.

A critic may retort that, leaving all of this aside, capitalism is democratic because every person gets to “vote with their dollars”. According to this argument, consumers get to determine the direction of the economy, which therefore ends up serving people’s needs in the most efficient possible way. But this argument does not hold water, for several reasons.

First, if dollars equal votes, then clearly some people have much more voting power than others. A single individual with a billion dollars would have more voting power than 66,000 workers earning the minimum wage. There is clearly nothing democratic about this. And it is all the more repugnant when we understand that those who hold dollars in excess of consumption requirements (in other words, the rich) are the ones who will have the power to invest in manipulating actual elections.

Second, even if we ignored this problem, the dollars of ordinary people do not equal votes, to the extent that you cannot buy things that are not being produced. We may want renewable energy, affordable housing, longer-lasting products, public transit and regenerative agriculture. But if these things are not being produced — because capital does not consider it profitable enough to do so — then no amount of waving our dollars is going to change that. If it did, then we would not suffer chronic deprivation of these things.

The reality is that capital does not allocate investment on the basis of what ordinary people actually need or want. It allocates investment to what is most profitable to capital, which may or may not align with human needs. Of course, for something to be profitable, there has to be some demand for it. Demand is a necessary but insufficient condition. But it is profitability, not demand, that determines investment. Capital determines production, and we only get to “vote” among the things that capital is willing to produce.

Ultimately, it is not a question of who has the power to consume, but who has the power to produce. Wealth represents not only power over consumption but, more importantly, command over the means of production. This includes command over our labour. Capital determines what we build and what we produce, and thus determines the shape and direction of our civilisation. If we do not have democratic control over production, then we can hardly say we live in a democracy.

None of this is inevitable. We can and should extend the principles of democracy into the economy. We know, empirically, that when people have democratic control over production — economic democracy — they are inclined to organise production more around meeting human needs, they manage resources more sustainably, and they distribute yields more fairly. Researchers have shown that if production were organised around these objectives, we could end deprivation and provide good lives for 8.5 billion people with less energy and resources than we presently use.

Decisions about what to produce and how to use our collective surplus should be democratically determined, rather than controlled by and for the interests of capitalists and the 1%. This can be achieved through universal public services and a public job guarantee (to ensure sufficient production of goods and services necessary for human well-being), democratic ownership of firms (such as in the case of Mondragon or Huawei), and a system of industrial policy, public finance and credit guidance (to ensure that investment and production aligns with democratically ratified objectives).

The path out of capitalism is economic democracy.

US politicians like to say that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. But Israel is not a democracy. Not by a long shot. In fact, it functions as one of the most undemocratic countries in the world.

Israel exercises total control over the West Bank and Gaza. These territories have no actual sovereignty. The West Bank (with 3 million people) is subjected to military occupation, which is illegal under international law. As for Gaza (2.1 million people), it is also under military occupation, according to international law, as Israel maintains direct control over its airspace, its coast, and its land borders, controlling everything that goes in and out.

The 5.1 million people living in these territories do not have the right to vote over the government that determines virtually everything about their lives. And their basic human rights under international law are unenforced and regularly violated with impunity.

On top of this, there are another 6 million Palestinians who have been forcibly removed from Palestine and who exist as stateless refugees with no rights within their homeland whatsoever.

So what’s going on here? Well, apartheid.

Many people get hung up on the apartheid analogy because when they think of apartheid in South Africa, they think of segregation and unequal rights among citizens, and they say this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Israel (it does). But this is known as “petty apartheid”, and it was only a minor part of the apartheid system in South Africa. The real action — “grand apartheid” — had much bigger designs, and this is where the analogy is strongest.

Grand apartheid was the process of reshaping territorial boundaries and citizenship. The idea was to forcibly remove the African population from the majority of the country’s territory — literally bulldozing their houses and loading them into trucks — and dump them onto tiny, fragmented chunks of land called Bantustans. Then you put a border around each Bantustan, give people “citizenship” there, give it a flag and a coat of arms, and set up a “parliament”.

Taking this approach — ethnic cleansing — the apartheid regime shoved most of the African population into enclaves comprising just 13% of the land and denied them any rights of citizenship within the “white” territory. White people justified this by saying Africans had rights in their own “countries”, the Bantustans. But, of course, the Bantustans were fake. They had no real power, no economic sovereignty, no independent militaries, etc. The apartheid regime controlled their borders and trade.

Israel was founded in 1948, the very same year the apartheid regime was established in South Africa, and has followed the grand apartheid playbook, chapter, and verse.

The Nakba began the process of shoving Palestinians off their land, out of their homes, and either:

(a) into the enclaves that today form Gaza and the West Bank, where 5.1 million people live within borders Israel controls, or
(b) into neighbouring countries, where 6 million Palestinians live as stateless refugees. The process of ethnic cleansing continues today.

The result?

More than 11 million people are hived off from the realm of rights within their own territory and denied the right to vote for the government that controls it.

Minority rule by Zionists is declared “democratic” only because it excludes the majority of the population. Calling this democracy is an extraordinary farce. There is no democracy within apartheid. Apartheid must be abolished. The 11 million must be free to return to their land and homes and must enjoy the full rights of citizenship within a fully democratic polity, including the right to vote for the people who govern them.

It also bears noting that, while US liberal discourse implies that they want to see democracy in the Middle East, nothing could be further from the truth. For the past 60 years, the US has propped up authoritarian regimes in the region in order to maintain its interests and has sought to crush liberation movements struggling for democracy. As Samir Amin pointed out, the US and Israel actively reject genuine democracies in the region because democratic Arab countries would quickly tip the balance of power in favour of the Palestinian cause.

The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is not a fringe opinion. Every major human rights organisation has taken this position, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch. And in 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that Israel is in violation of Article 3 of CERD, which condemns and prohibits “racial segregation and apartheid”.

Israel is an apartheid regime. Apartheid is recognized as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and it must be abolished.

The first study is published by Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The Ash Center operates what they describe as “the longest-running independent effort to track Chinese citizen satisfaction with government performance”. Regular surveys have been conducted since 2003. The most recent results were published in 2020, in a report titled “Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time”.

This is not a pro-China publication. In fact, the Ash Center starts with the assumption that China is an authoritarian system dependent on coercion, and is therefore likely to face a crisis of public legitimacy. But the study’s actual results establish very different conclusions.

The authors summarize their results as follows. “We find that, since the start of the survey in 2003, Chinese citizen satisfaction with government has increased virtually across the board. From the impact of broad national policies to the conduct of local town officials, Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before. Interestingly, more marginalized groups in poorer, inland regions are actually comparatively more likely to report increases in satisfaction. Second, the attitudes of Chinese citizens appear to respond (both positively and negatively) to real changes in their material well-being.”

The report finds that public satisfaction with the central government is extremely high. In 2016, the final year of data, it stood at 93%, having generally increased over time. Satisfaction with lower levels of government is somewhat lower but still very strong; for instance, provincial governments enjoyed 82% support in the final year of data.

The second study is published by the Alliance of Democracies (AoD), a Danish NGO founded by the former Secretary General of NATO and the former Prime Minister of Denmark. AoD partners with Latana, a market research firm based in Germany, to conduct annual surveys on democracy perception in more than 50 countries around the world. They have published the Democracy Perception Index report every year since 2019. It is the gold standard in the industry, produced by liberal institutions that certainly cannot be accused of having a pro-China bias. And yet the results on China are consistently striking.

According to the most recent report (2024), people in China have overwhelmingly positive views of their political system. 92% of people say that democracy is important to them, 79% say that their country is democratic, 91% say that the government serves the interests of most people (rather than a small group), and 85% say all people have equal rights before the law. Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world. The figure below compares China’s results to those from the US, France and Britain. These results may help explain the high levels of satisfaction with government reported by the Ash Center.

The AoD study also assesses people’s perceptions of freedom of expression, and free and fair elections. Here too, China outperforms the US and most of Europe. When given the statement “Everyone in my country can freely express their opinion on political and social topics”, only 18% of people in China disagreed (compared to 27% in the US). And when given “Political leaders in my country are elected in free and fair elections”, only 5% in China disagreed (compared to 27% in the US).

Many people are surprised by the AoD results for China because they believe China does not in fact have a democratic system. It is true that China does not have a Western-style liberal democracy, where voters elect the head of state every few years. But it does have its own system of democracy, which it refers to as a “whole-process people’s democracy”, with principles of democratic centralism and a unique party system. This system seeks to institutionalize popular engagement in the policy-making process to ensure responsiveness to people’s needs (see summaries here and here, and a podcast on this with US Professor Ken Hammond here). Direct elections occur at the two most local levels of the National People’s Congress, with elected deputies then voting for those who will serve in the higher levels.

Whatever one might think of this system, it is clear that most people in China seem to like it.

The results of the AoD study suggest that what matters most when it comes to people’s perceptions of democracy is not whether their country has Western-style elections, but whether they believe their government acts in the interest of most people. In many Western countries that have regular multi-party elections, people do not believe that their governments act in the interests of most people, and do not believe their countries are democratic. In China, people overwhelmingly perceive that their government acts in the interests of most people, and this may be key to high democracy perception there.

This result is not particularly surprising, given that CPC came to power through a popular revolution that enjoyed mass support from peasants and workers, with the explicit objective of improving the lives of the oppressed majority. While China has experienced several major policy changes over time, including a process of market liberalization in the 1980s that caused high inflation and widespread protest, over the past decade the government has taken strong steps to reduce poverty and ensure universal access to good housing, food, healthcare and education.

None of this is to say that China’s political system does not have problems and internal contradictions that must be overcome. It does, just as all countries do - nobody could reasonably claim otherwise. But these studies point to an important reality that should be grappled with: that the Chinese people have a much higher regard for their political system than people in the West tend to assume.

One possible criticism of these survey results is that people may overstate support for their government if they live in a system where political dissent is repressed. This is known as “strategic misreporting”.

The Latana methodology is explicitly designed to mitigate against this possibility. The AoD report states “In contrast to surveys conducted face-to-face or by telephone, the anonymity offered by Latana’s methodology may help reduce response bias, interviewer bias, and respondent self-censorship.” These methods appear to be effective. If China’s positive results are due to fear of repression, we would expect to see similarly positive results in countries that are regarded as having repressive governments, but this does not occur. People living in such states do not hesitate to express critical opinions. For instance, in Russia only 50% of people said their country was democratic.

Whether the methodology of the Harvard study is vulnerable to strategic misreporting is less clear. However, researchers have carried out several studies to test this in China, with methodologies designed to exclude strategic misreporting - such as list experiments and implicit association tests. I have summarized this literature here. Over and over again, these studies confirm that people in China do indeed have high levels of support for their government and their political-economic system.

On March 4, Bernie Sanders published a statement saying “For 250 years, the United States has supported democracy”, expressing his concern that the Trump administration has taken an authoritarian turn that violates a centuries-long tradition of US democratic principles at home and abroad. This is not uncommon to hear from US politicians. Biden routinely referred to the US as a “beacon of democracy”, as did many presidents before him. The statement from Sanders simply highlights how widespread this narrative is in the US, across the congressional political spectrum.

One can understand what Sanders is trying to argue. But this claim about the US and democracy is fundamentally incorrect. Indeed, the evidence against it is overwhelming.

The United States was not in fact founded as a democracy. On the contrary, it was an apartheid regime, with institutionalized inequality on the basis of race, gender and class, and governed as an oligarchy. This is not hyperbole, it is a well-documented reality. US states generally limited voting rights to white males who owned property (about 6% of the population). Working class people, women, and people of colour overwhelmingly did not have the right to vote. Virtually all Black people were subject to mass enslavement and had no rights whatsoever, and Indigenous Americans were targets of government-sponsored ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The property criteria was only fully abolished in 1856. Women were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. For Indigenous Americans, it was 1948. Racial segregation — the US system of apartheid — was not fully abolished until 1964. And it wasn’t until 1965 that voting rights were formally guaranteed for all minorities. This point is worth underscoring: the United States did not have universal franchise until 1965, nearly 190 years after its founding. And in each case, the franchise was not handed down by a government committed to democratic principles but fought for and won by working-class people through organised collective struggle.

Even so, the extent to which the US functions as a democracy today is highly questionable. Power is passed back and forth between two establishment parties, both of which are run by rich people and committed to the interests of capital. Third parties are effectively frozen out of the national political process. And elites and corporations can spend unlimited money on campaign finance, to install politicians that will shape policy to their benefit, in a form of institutionalized political corruption. Democracy cannot function under these conditions.

This is born out by evidence. A 2014 study published by Cambridge University Press found that US policy implementation generally follows the preferences of elites and organized business lobbies, even when it runs against the preferences of the majority. In other words, the US more closely resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. This helps make sense of data from the Democracy Perception Index, which in 2023 showed that only 54% of US Americans believe their country is actually democratic, and only 42% say the government serves the majority of people.

So much for democracy at home. What about abroad? US politicians claim that the United States champions democracy around the world. But in fact, the US record on this is overwhelmingly the opposite.

The US regularly intervenes in foreign elections to corrupt the democratic process in favour of US interests. A recent study by Dov Levin documents that the US intervened in foreign elections at least 128 times between 1946 and 2014, usually to prevent left-wing parties from forming a government or retaining power.

During the 20th century, the US actively opposed anti-colonial liberation struggles in Asia and Africa, which were fighting for democracy and equal rights. It famously supported the apartheid regime in South Africa (the US government collaborated in the imprisonment of Mandela and listed him as a “terrorist” until 2008), and continues to support the apartheid regime of Israel today. The US propped up the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Shah’s dictatorship in Iran, the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire, the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and many others. This continues today: a recent report found that 73% of the world’s dictatorships receive direct military support from the United States.

The US also has a long history of engaging in regime change operations in other countries, to ensure the conditions for US geopolitical hegemony and capital accumulation. Academics and journalists such as Lindsey O’Rourke, William Blum and others have documented at least 113 such operations since 1949, based on official records (not including operations conducted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary). Half of these were perpetrated against liberal democracies or democratic centralist states. The US famously backed coups or assassinations against democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of whom were replaced by dictators.

In sum, the United States was not founded as a democracy, has not been a democracy for the majority of its existence, suffers very severe democratic deficits today to the point where it continues to function as an oligarchy, and has a long record of preventing, undermining and even destroying democratic governments abroad. This problem did not start with the Trump administration; it is a structural pathology of the US system. The political objective for progressives in the US should be to fight to change it.

Image by Ralf1403

Researchers have developed new and more robust ways to measure global extreme poverty, based on people’s access to essential goods. Jason Hickel, Michail Moatsos and Dylan Sullivan show that this data presents a more complex – and more troubling – story of poverty than existing narratives would suggest.

In international development circles, most people are familiar with the World Bank’s data showing that extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the past several decades, from 43 per cent of the world’s population in 1981 to less than 10 per cent today. This narrative is based on the World Bank’s method of calculating the share of people who live on less than $1.90 per day (in 2011 “PPP” terms).

But a growing body of literature argues that the World Bank’s PPP-based method suffers from a major empirical limitation, in that it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs in any given context (see here, here and here). Having more than $1.90 PPP does not guarantee that a person can afford the specific goods and services that are necessary for survival.

In recent years, scholars have developed a more accurate method for measuring extreme poverty, by comparing people’s incomes to the prices of essential goods in each country (specifically food, shelter, clothing and fuel). This approach is known as the “basic needs poverty line” (BNPL), and it more closely approximates what the original concept of “extreme poverty” was intended to measure. The OECD has published BNPL poverty figures for most countries. Robust data exists for the years during which both household surveys and direct price data are available, which generally covers the period 1980-2008 (more on this below).

A new time series of global extreme poverty

While the OECD publication is the most reliable source for BNPL time series data, the published global series does not include the original price data for one of the world’s largest economies, China. With Michail Moatsos, the author of the OECD work, we incorporated the original price data for China in a recent paper in New Political Economy, presenting a complete picture of global poverty using the BNPL approach. Here, we connect this with additional BNPL data for the year 2011, drawing on research by Robert Allen. Allen relies on different sources of price data than the OECD paper, which may affect the trend from 2008 to 2011. However, we have chosen to combine these datasets because they are the best available estimates of extreme poverty for the periods they cover.

The BNPL data indicates that the story of global poverty over the past few decades is more complex, and more troubling than existing narratives allow. Figure 1 shows that global extreme poverty increased quite substantially during the period of liberalisation and structural adjustment in the 1990s. Progress resumed in the 2000s. In 2011, around 17% of humanity could not afford basic essentials, down by less than 6 percentage points from 1980. The number of people in extreme poverty increased from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion over this period.

It’s important to note here that the OECD publication also includes poverty estimates for the entire period from 1820-2018. Crucially, though, these estimates are not always based on direct data. For most countries, household survey data does not exist prior to about 1980.* Instead, the OECD figures use historical GDP growth rates as a proxy for changes in household consumption during this period. This approach faces significant limitations, however, as GDP growth rates do not adequately represent changes in non-commodity forms of consumption, particularly during periods of colonisation and liberalisation. Moreover, in the OECD publication, food prices are generally not available after 2008. For the post-2008 period, figures are calculated on the assumption that food prices moved in line with CPI, which is quite often not the case. These figures must therefore be treated with caution. (For more on these issues, see footnote 2 in our New Political Economy paper, as well as Appendix I (1.1) in this recent paper in World Development.)

What the latest findings mean

The estimates that we show here have important implications for the Millennium Development Goals. MDG1 set out to halve the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. Figure 1 shows that the poverty rate was 21.2% in 1990. If we accept the assumption that food prices moved in line with CPI, the global extreme poverty rate in 2015 would have been 12% (according to the OECD estimates). In other words, according to the BNPL approach, MDG1 was missed, albeit narrowly. These results stand in contrast to the World Bank’s claims that the target was achieved much earlier, in 2010, and exceeded by a wide margin in 2015. It is worth noting that the 2015 figure may not be accurate, as it is unlikely that basic food prices have moved in line with the CPI.

While robust BNPL data does not exist after 2011, we do have data from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization on food insecurity. It shows that the proportion of the world population experiencing “moderate and severe” food insecurity increased steadily during the period 2014 to 2020, from 23% to 30% (see Figure 2). As access to food is central to the BNPL method, we may assume that post-2011 poverty trends have probably not improved much, if at all.

Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but a sign of severe dislocation. Historical data on real wages since the 15^th century indicates that under normal conditions, across different societies and eras, people are generally able to meet their subsistence needs except during periods of severe social displacement, such as famines, wars, and institutionalised dispossession, particularly under European colonialism. What is more, BNPL data shows that many countries have managed to keep extreme poverty very close to zero, even with low levels of GDP per capita, by using strategies such as public provisioning and price controls for basic essentials.

In other words, extreme poverty can be prevented much more easily than most people assume. Indeed, it need not exist at all. The fact that it persists at such high levels today indicates that severe dislocation is institutionalised in the world economy – and that markets have failed to meet the basic needs of much of humanity. To address this problem, and to end extreme poverty – the first objective of the Sustainable Development Goals – will require public planning to prioritise the production of, and guarantee access to, the specific goods and services that people need to live decent lives.

*Survey data becomes available at different times for different countries – eg, 1977 for India; 1980 for Madagascar; 1981 for China and Brazil; and so on. We chose to start our analysis in 1980, when coverage began to pick up and when extrapolated years were close enough to direct data that major inaccuracies were unlikely.

*This piece was originally published on LSE Blogs

One of the central insights emerging from research on degrowth and climate mitigation is that universal public services are crucial to a just and effective transition.

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head. At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs. From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.

There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.

This approach also has several other direct social and ecological benefits. For one, it can have a strong positive impact on human welfare. We know from empirical studies that public services are a powerful driver of improvements in life expectancy, well-being, and other key social indicators (here, here and here). Universal services would also end the current cost-of-living crisis, by directly reducing the cost of living.

We also know that countries with decommodified or otherwise universal public services can deliver better social outcomes at any given level of GDP and resource use (here, here, here, here and here). Universal services ensure an efficient conversion of resources and energy into social outcomes. Furthermore, as we will see, public control over provisioning systems makes it easier to achieve rapid decarbonization in those sectors.

Finally, together with a second key policy — the public job guarantee — this approach would permanently end economic insecurity and resolve the current contradiction between social and ecological objectives. Right now it is impossible to take even obvious steps toward climate mitigation (such as scaling down fossil fuel production or other destructive sectors), because people in affected industries would lose access to wages, housing, healthcare, etc. No one should accept such an outcome. With universal services and an emancipatory job guarantee, we can protect against any economic insecurity and guarantee a just transition. There is no necessary contradiction between ecological and social objectives. The two can and must be pursued together.

By universal services here I mean not only healthcare and education, but also housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications. In other words, a decommodification of the core social sector — the means of everyday survival. And I mean attractive, high-quality, democratically managed, properly universal services, not the purposefully shitty last-resort systems we see in the US and other neoliberal countries. What does this look like? How do we get there?

Healthcare and education. This one is common: most European countries have universal healthcare and education systems, many of which rank as the best health systems in the world. The key principle is that healthcare should be free at the point of use, ideally through a public provider, without the intermediation of expensive private insurers. Similarly, public education should be tuition-free from primary school through university. Existing debts accrued for healthcare and education should be cancelled.

Housing. Housing costs constitute a large portion of household expenses. This is an essential good, as necessary as healthcare and education. Yet people often spend 30-50% of their wages on rent (for housing that is often woefully substandard), and buying a house is in many places increasingly unaffordable to anyone who isn’t rich. It’s important to recognize a distinction between owning one's own residence (fine) and private control of rental units, which is where problems arise, particularly in the case of large corporate landlords that control dozens or even thousands of homes. The latter represents enclosure of a key resource that is fundamental for survival. We don’t tolerate this for healthcare, but for some reason we regularly do when it comes to housing.

One effective intervention would be to simply limit the number of rental units that any individual or firm can own, and require the sale of surplus properties. The influx of housing into the market would drive prices down, making it more affordable for people to buy a residence, but also making it more affordable for city governments to buy units, expand the public housing stock and improve the quality of housing, which would be naturally integrated into the fabric of the city. Public rental units can then be available on an affordable basis, and any remaining private rental units would need to have rates low enough to compete with the public option. Vienna and Singapore offer a model for attractive, high-quality public housing that is enjoyed by 60-80% of the population. And such an approach can be used to achieve rapid efficiency improvements in the housing sector, including insulation, heat pumps and efficient appliances, thus helping to achieve rapid decarbonization.

Transit. Public transit should be available for free or very cheap. Barcelona provides a good example, where metro and tram journeys across the city’s bright, clean and efficient system cost only one euro, and e-bikes cost a fraction of that. But nearly 100 cities around the world go further and offer free public transit. In places where existing public transit infrastructure is inadequate, it should be developed to the point where people do not need cars on a regular basis. High-quality public transit is critical to reducing demand for cars and reducing emissions from transport.

Food. Our food system suffers from several problems. Many people cannot afford or access nutritious food, even in the world’s richest nations. Supermarkets tend to be controlled overwhelmingly by a few large corporations, which prioritize profitable processed foods, with supply chains that rely heavily on plastic packaging and long-distance transport. This model is highly energy- and monoculture-intensive, with vast tracts of land appropriated for industrial meat production, which leads to deforestation, emissions, soil depletion and biodiversity loss.

A food justice program could ensure universal access to nutritious, regenerative, vegetarian food. Governments can fund the development of regenerative farms, as well as food gardens in urban and suburban areas, with produce sold at affordable prices through community hubs in every neighbourhood that can double as cafeterias serving vegetarian meals. These would be convenient and attractive places for anyone to shop and eat, providing high-quality foods covering all necessary nutritional needs, while facilitating conviviality and community engagement. Such a system would improve health outcomes and also help to dramatically reduce land use and the ecological impact of the food system.

Energy and water. These are essential to human survival. Energy and water should be run as public utilities, with a two-tier pricing system: a quota of energy and water should be made available for free to all households, adjusted for the number of residents, sufficient to meet basic needs. Additional use of energy and water beyond this quota can be charged at a progressive rate to disincentivize excess throughput — delivering yet further benefits for the environment. This approach tends to have strong popular support. The public energy system can be used to reduce fossil fuel use on a science-based schedule and prioritize a rapid transition to renewables, while rules governing the public water system can be used to prevent over-extraction by private firms and ensure a stable and equitably allocated supply of water during droughts.

Communications. Internet access and mobile phone data are necessary for daily life and should be treated as public utilities. A basic monthly package should be available to individuals or households for free, with additional data and other services available at market rates. The public provider would be fully independent from the government, with cutting-edge data security to preclude any state censorship. Much like the postal service does not read the letters it delivers, a public data network should be designed to protect privacy.

To this list we should also add three more key services that should be decommodified and available to all: child care, elder care, and recreational facilities (parks, gyms, sports grounds, community halls, theatres, etc).

How to pay for it? The traditional answer is that to pay for public services you first need more GDP growth: increase corporate production of stuff we don’t need, then tax the revenues from that production to fund public production of stuff we do need. This assumption is so entrenched in the public imagination that it is completely taken for granted. It is leveraged by the right to claim that public services are somehow given to us by rich people (those who pay “the most” taxes, which of course is quite often not even true), so we should therefore be grateful to them and do whatever it takes to let them accumulate more. It is also ecologically dangerous. We urgently need things like public transit and renewable energy to meet our climate goals. If we need more corporate growth to “pay” for these things, it increases total energy demand and makes decarbonization more difficult to achieve.

In reality, there is no reason that public production needs to rely on “funding” from prior private production (as if corporations somehow produce money, which of course they do not). Any government that has sufficient monetary sovereignty can mobilize public production directly, simply by issuing public finance to do it. As Keynes pointed out: anything we can actually do, in terms of productive capacity, we can pay for. And when it comes to productive capacity, high-income economies already have far more than they need. Deploying public finance simply shifts the use of this capacity from corporations to the public, where it can be used for democratically ratified social and ecological objectives, rather than for capital accumulation.

The job guarantee. This same approach can be used to fund a public job guarantee. The JG would permanently end unemployment, and ensure that anyone who wants to can train to participate in the most important collective projects of our generation: expanding renewable energy capacity, regenerating ecosystems, improving public services, care work, etc. — urgent, socially-necessary production with living wages and workplace democracy. The JG would help reorient labour toward social and ecological use-value rather than servicing corporate profit. The program would have to be financed by the government, the currency issuer, but should be democratically managed at the appropriate level of locality, to determine what forms of production are most necessary to meet community needs. And of course a basic income should be available to anyone who cannot work or who for whatever reason chooses not to.

This idea proves wildly popular in polls. And the additional power of the job guarantee is that it can be used to set standards for wages and working time (shortening the working week to, say, 32 hours) and workplace democracy across the whole economy, as private firms would come under pressure to adopt standards similar to the JG or otherwise risk losing staff. Because if people can opt to do dignified, socially important work in a democratic workplace, then why would they agree to do meaningless labour under worse conditions for corporate firms whose primary goal is just to accumulate capital? They wouldn’t.

The power of universal public services is that we can improve people’s access to goods necessary for decent living, with provisioning systems that require less aggregate energy and material use and which allow us to accelerate decarbonization. These outcomes can be further enhanced by ensuring strong democratic governance of public systems. Together with the job guarantee, economic insecurity is permanently abolished — accomplishing a goal that growth alone has never been able to achieve — and human well-being is de-linked from the requirement of ever-increasing aggregate production. This would change the political landscape, freeing us to pursue necessary climate action without any risk to employment and livelihoods, while improving social outcomes, reducing inequality and facilitating a shift toward a more just and ecological economy.

These policies should be core demands of a united climate and labour movement. Universal services, a job guarantee, living wages, a shorter working week — these are popular interventions that could provide the basis for mass political support. For the labour movement, we need to stop pretending that capitalist growth will magically end unemployment, ensure living wages and bring workplace democracy — which it never does — and instead fight to achieve these objectives directly. And for the climate movement, which is often accused of ignoring the material conditions of working-class communities, this approach addresses real bread-and-butter needs and creates cause for alliances with working-class formations. This is the political movement we need.

Here is a list of studies, surveys and polling results that shed some light on popular perceptions of post-capitalist and ecosocialist ideas. I will update this list periodically.

Support for post-capitalist policies

1. Sufficiency-oriented policies. A study of European citizens’ assemblies found that sufficiency policies enjoy very high approval rates (93%). The study also found that sufficiency objectives achieved through regulatory policies had the highest support. Source: Energy Research and Social Science, 2023.

2. Public job guarantee. The job guarantee is highly popular in polls. In the UK, 72% of people support it. In the US, it's 78%, and in France it’s 79%. There are few policies that enjoy such widespread support, and research shows it can appeal strongly to working-class voters who otherwise feel alienated from the political process.

3. Workplace democracy. This study finds that US Americans prefer workplace democracy (where workers own shares, are represented on boards, and elect their managers), even while recognizing this requires more responsibility. American Political Science Review, 2023.

4. Universal public services. Polls show that universal public services are popular in the UK (substantial majorities want public control over healthcare, education, energy, rail, water, postal services, parks, etc.). In the G20, 75% support universal healthcare. In the US, 64% of people support universal healthcare, while 62-64% support a public option for housing, internet and childcare.

5. Rent controls. Polling in the UK shows that 74% of people support permanent rent controls. In the US, polls in Massachusetts and California show majority support for rent controls (71% and 55% respectively).

6. Living wages. Polling in the US shows that 72% of people support a living wage. In the UK, 87% believe that companies should pay a living wage if they can afford to.

7. Progressive taxation. In Europe, 84% of people support a global tax on millionaries (in the US, 69% support). Across the G20, 70% of people support progressive income taxation.

8. Reduced inequality. Data from 40 countries reveal that people tend to prefer relatively low pay ratios (around 4:1) between CEOs/ministers and low-skilled workers, dramatically lower than real-existing ratios. This conclusion holds across demographic groups. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2014.

9. Transformation of international institutions. In Europe, 71% of people support democratizing international institutions such as the UN and IMF with population-proportionate voting shares (in the US, 58% of people support).

10. Climate justice. A WID study shows strong majorities in Europe and the US support high-income countries compensating low-income countries for climate damages, funding renewable energy in low-income countries, and supporting low-income countries to adapt to climate change. Approximately 80-90% of people in high- and medium-income countries believe there should be a global tax on millionaires to finance low-income countries, and call for a global democratic assembly on climate change. 88-91% believe that national shares of the carbon budget should be in proportion to population, and 72-82% believe that countries that have emitted more since 1990 should receive a smaller share.

Support for post-capitalism

1. A survey shows that a majority of people around the world (56%) agree with the statement “Capitalism does more harm than good”. In France it is 69%, in India it is 74%. Source: Edelman Trust Barometer, 2020.

2. A study found that in 28 of 34 countries, a majority of respondents hold anti-capitalist positions. Source: Economic Affairs, 2023.

3. A survey of G20 countries found that 74% say that the economy should prioritise the health and well-being of people and nature rather than focusing solely on profit and wealth. Source: Global Commons Survey, 2021.

4. A study of the US, Canada, Australia and the UK found that in all four countries, a majority of respondents aged 18-34 (54-61%) agreed that “socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens”. Source: Fraser Institute, with polling done by Leger, 2023.

5. A study of US public opinion found that 62% of respondents aged 18-30 hold favourable views of socialism. And more Democrats have positive views of socialism (67%) than capitalism (50%). Source: Cato Institute, with polling done by YouGov, 2025.

6. A survey of youth climate movement groups found that more than half say that the root cause of the climate and ecological crisis is “a system that puts profit over people and planet”. 89% of this group specified the system as capitalism. Source: Climate Vanguard, 2023.

Scientists’ support for post-growth

1. A survey of nearly 800 climate policy researchers around the world found that 73% support post-growth (i.e., agrowth and degrowth) positions. In the EU, 86% of climate policy researchers support post-growth positions. Source: Nature Sustainability (2023). Also see press release: “Green growth loses favour with climate policy scientists”; and a write-up in The Conversation.

2. A survey of nearly 500 sustainability scholars found that 77% call for post-growth pathways in high-income countries (80% call for post-growth in high-income countries after 2030). Source: Ecological Economics (2023). Also see write-up here: “Scientific consensus on post-growth over green growth”.

3. A survey of staff at the German Environment Agency found that 99% of environmental protection specialists indicate an implied preference for growth-critical concepts (post-growth/agrowth/degrowth). 75% express an explicit preference for growth-critical concepts, and specialists with more knowledge of growth-critical concepts are even more likely to prefer them. Source: Journal of Cleaner Production, 2022.

4. A study exploring two survey datasets found that 61% of the Spanish public and 69% of international scientists hold growth-critical positions (agrowth or degrowth), with less than one third of respondents in each survey expressing support for green growth. Source: Ecological Economics, 2019.

Public support for post-growth

1. A survey of people in 34 European countries found that on average 61% are in favour of post-growth. The study also finds that support for post-growth is lower among disadvantaged communities, indicating the need to highlight the key role of redistributive policies that can improve livelihoods and economic security for the working-classes. Source: Futures, 2022.

2. A survey study done by the German Environment Agency found that 88% agree that “we must find ways of living well regardless of economic growth”, and 77% agree that “there are natural limits to growth and we went beyond them”. Source: Umwelt Bundesamt, 2023.

3. Poll shows that 81% of people in Britain believe that the prime objective of the governments should be to secure “the greatest happiness” for people rather than “the greatest wealth”. Source: BBC, 2006.

4. A consumer research study found that 70% of more than 10,000 people surveyed in 29 high-income and middle-income countries believe that “overconsumption is putting our planet and society at risk”. 65% believe that “our society would be better off if people shared more and owned less.” Source: Sustainable Brands, 2014.

Attitudes on environment vs. growth

1. Poll shows that 70% of US Americans believe that “environmental protection is more important than economic growth”. Source: Yale Climate Opinion Maps, 2018. Note that Yale has not used this question in more recent climate opinion surveys.

2. Poll shows that substantial majorities of people in 10 of 12 European countries believe that protecting the environment should be made a priority even if it comes at the expense of economic growth. Source: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2019.

3. Gallup poll data shows a majority of respondents believe that environmental protection should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing growth. Source: Gallup, 2023.

4. A review of representative surveys in Europe and the US finds that when people have to choose between growth and environmental protection, environmental protection is prioritized in most surveys and countries. Source: Ecological Economics, 2018.

5. Data from the USA shows that lower-income groups are more concerned about the environment, and consistently priortize environmental protection over economic growth, compared to higher-income groups. Source: Ecological Economics, 2025.

**Note: these studies are remarkable because respondents are willing to prioritize environment over economic growth even though they may assume that harming growth could have social downsides. It is reasonable to expect that, if respondents were informed that post-growth policy can improve social outcomes, support for these statements may be even stronger.

See here for an updated list: https://explore.degrowth.net/degrowth/degrowth-is-popular/

*Image by Tumisu

I want to make a brief intervention here to highlight an aspect of degrowth climate mitigation strategy that has so far been inadequately developed. It is widely understood that scaling down less-necessary forms of production can contribute substantially to decarbonization, in two direct and obvious ways. First, it directly reduces emissions in addition to what can be achieved through efficiency improvements and renewable energy deployment. Second, it reduces total energy demand and therefore makes it possible to decarbonize the energy system much more quickly, because it is not necessary to install as much new infrastructure, and the process of doing it involves less extraction and emissions. These are powerful benefits.

But there are several other benefits to a degrowth scenario that are less widely understood and are worth considering.

Here’s the main thing. If high-income countries are to decarbonize fast enough to stay within their fair-share of Paris-compliant carbon budgets, then urgent climate mitigation tasks – like building renewable energy capacity, insulating buildings, expanding public transit, innovating and distributing more efficient technologies, regenerating land, etc – need to happen very quickly. This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on. In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy). This cannot be done at just any desired speed. Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize.

Scaling down less-necessary production solves this problem, not only because of the two benefits indicated above, but also because it liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization. For example, factories that are presently devoted to producing SUVs can produce solar panels instead. Engineers that are presently developing private jets can work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead. Labour that is presently employed by fast fashion firms can be liberated to train and contribute to installing renewable capacity, insulating buildings, or a wide range of other necessary objectives depending on their interests, through a public job guarantee program linked to green public works.

This helps us rethink a longstanding question in ecological economics. Some ecomodernists have in the past argued that it is easier to achieve green transition in a bigger economy than in a smaller economy, because it means we have more capacity to devote to green production. But this fails to grasp the nature of the problem. Yes, a bigger economy may have more capacity, but in a growth-oriented scenario that capacity is already allocated. In this respect bigger economies face the same problem as smaller economies. But a degrowth scenario is not a “smaller economy” (i.e., a low-capacity economy). It is a high-capacity economy which is reducing less-necessary production, and therefore is suddenly endowed with spare capacity that can be redirected for necessary purposes. This is a unique situation that carries significant potential: it enables acceleration in the speed of green production and innovation at a rate faster than what can be achieved in a growth-oriented scenario.

By the way, this spare capacity can also be directed toward urgent social goals, too—for example to provision universal public services—in order to end the needless misery and deprivation that so many people suffer in our existing economy.

Of course, we need some way of mobilizing the spare capacity. This requires finance. And this brings us to another problem. Whoever controls finance determines what we produce, and therefore how our productive capacity is allocated. In our existing economy, finance is controlled by capital, and capital invests in producing what is most profitable rather than what is most necessary. This is why we get substantial investment in fossil fuels, SUVs and fast fashion (which are highly profitable) and insufficient investment in renewable energy, public transit and insulation (which are either not as profitable, or not profitable at all). Under capitalism, then, there are real limits to how quickly we can scale up green production and innovation. Capital would rather do other things.

To deal with this problem, we need a greater role for public finance. Instead of waiting for capital to make the necessary investments, governments that have sufficient monetary sovereignty can issue currency to do it directly, in the manner that we describe in this recent article in Ecological Economics (and see here for a discussion of options within the Eurozone). Of course, there are limits to this process: if the new demand exceeds the productive capacity of the economy, it will drive inflation. But this problem is mitigated in a degrowth scenario, where we are reducing less-necessary production and therefore liberating capacity. Furthermore, inflationary pressures can be controlled by using taxation to cut the purchasing power of the rich, and by regulating private money creation in both quantitative and qualitative ways.

It helps to recognize that when we talk about “investment”, money is just the vehicle. The real investment actually takes the form of allocating real productive capacity: real labour, materials, energy etc. Once we understand this fact, it becomes clear that a degrowth scenario enables investment in green production and innovation, by making real productive capacity available.

This represents an important rebuttal to the claim made by many economists that the only way to “fund” the green transition is first to increase growth. The assumption here is that we need higher GDP in order to obtain higher tax revenues to finance green production (in other words, increase corporate production of stuff, and then take some of the money from this to spend on green production). From this point of view, degrowth is self-defeating: less GDP, less tax revenue, less green production. But the flaw in this thinking should be immediately clear. Corporations do not produce money. They produce things. To say that we need to increase growth (i.e., increase production of existing things) in order to “fund” green production is tantamount to saying we need to increase production of SUVs, fast fashion and private jets in order to increase production of solar panels and public transit. Clearly this is absurd. We can increase green production directly, with public finance. And indeed this process is enabled – not inhibited – by reducing less-necessary forms of production and thus liberating productive capacity to be redirected for other purposes.

If this approach to public finance is so straightforward, why don’t governments do it? The short answer is: because they are capitalist. The approach I have described here represents an increase in democratic public control over productive capacity. This is good. We should have greater control over the allocation of our own collective labour and resources, so that we can direct it toward necessary objectives (compared to the existing arrangement, where capital controls our productive capacity, in a non-democratic way, and directs it toward what is profitable to capital). But this necessarily requires reducing capitalist control over productive capacity, which of course runs directly against the interests of capital accumulation. This is why capitalist governments tend to reproduce narratives like “we have to tax before we can spend” and “we must reduce the deficit”, even while knowing these claims to be false, because myths like these reign in our expectations for how much public production we can do, and indeed justify curtailing public production in order to ensure that a larger share of our productive capacity remains in the hands of private capital.

Of course, in high-income countries the remobilization of production to achieve ecological objectives must occur within an overall aggregate reduction of energy and material throughput to sustainable levels (degrowth), as ecological economists have established. We should also be clear that what I have described above need not reinscribe productivist or growthist visions. Yes, accelerated production of certain things is necessary to accomplish urgent social and ecological tasks (building sufficient renewable energy capacity and establishing universal public services, for instance), but these tasks are not indefinite and – unlike the objective of capitalist growth – do not require perpetually increasing production. Once necessary objectives are achieved, the level of production can be adjusted in a democratic way according to what is socially and ecologically necessary.

The power of this approach is extraordinary. Those who wish to unleash technological innovation and production to achieve ecological objectives often hitch their wagon to capitalist growth. But capitalism and growthism limit what we can achieve, for the reasons I’ve described here. Degrowth, combined with a robust public finance strategy, can enable us to overcome these limits, improve our potential for green production and innovation, and enable us to achieve rapid decarbonization.

*Image by TimHill

The Divide was first published in 2017. In the years since, many people have written to me, or approached me during public events, to share the impact it had on them. I am always grateful for this. And yet as a researcher, I look back on the text now and wish that it could include all that I have learned over the past seven years. Knowledge moves quickly, and I want to make it available to readers. My goal with The Divide was to serve as an accessible introduction. I hope it continues to do that for readers. But - until Penguin is ready to produce a new edition - here are some resources that I encourage people to explore for more information and new knowledge.

1. On the rise of capitalism in Europe

The Divide briefly describes the violent processes of enclosure and dispossession that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe during the long 16th century. This description is improved with new information and references in the opening chapters of Less is More. It describes how worker revolutions brought down feudalism and improved human welfare, before elites responded with enclosure and other interventions to push wages back down and restore working-class subordination.

2. On the human toll of colonialism and capitalist integration

The Divide describes the devastating suffering that was inflicted on people in Asia, Africa and the Americas as they were colonized and forcibly integrated into the capitalist world-economy. In a recent article for World Development, we assessed this history more systematically by looking at empirical data on real wages, human height and mortality rates from the 16th century onward. We found that the rise of capitalism and its imposition around the world was associated with a striking decline in social indicators, with wages often crashing to below subsistence and mass mortality crises occurring in several regions. In the global South, recovery only began during the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of progressive and radical anti-colonial movements that reclaimed control over national resources and production.[1]

This history offers an important counterpoint to dominant narratives claiming that capitalism rescued people from widespread extreme poverty. Quite the opposite is true: capitalism caused widespread extreme poverty, and progress in human development was brought by progressive social movements and governments in the post-colonial era. This history is also captured in Amya Kumar Bagchi’s book Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.

3. On neo-colonial backlash

The Divide describes how the USA, Britain, France and other imperialist powers intervened violently to stop the rise of progressive and radical governments in the global South in the mid-20th century, deposing and sometimes assassinating progressive leaders in coups, and imposing structural adjustment programmes to reverse their progressive economic reforms. This history has since been described yet further in several excellent new books: The Jakarta Method (by Vincent Bevin), which tells the story of the bloody anti-communist crusades perpetrated across the global South by the US and its allies, and Capital and Imperialism (by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik), which describes the economic mechanisms of the imperialist world economy past and present. I also recommend Imperialism in the 21st Century (by John Smith), and Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (by Intan Suwandi).

4. On drain from the global South

The Divide describes how the wealthy economies of the global North appropriate much more from the global South than they give in aid. In recent years, researchers have quantified this drain more comprehensively, building on methods first described by early theorists of “unequal exchange”. My colleagues and I have contributed to this work in several recent articles. In one, we describe how growth in the global North relies on a large net appropriation of labour, land, energy and materials from the global South, embodied in traded goods. This appropriation is worth more than $10 trillion per year, represented in Northern prices, which would be enough to end extreme poverty in the global South 70 times over.[2] This drains the South of resources necessary for development, it perpetuates mass deprivation, and it means that the social and ecological costs of Northern growth are overwhelmingly suffered in the South.

5. On the colonial dimensions of ecological breakdown

Since writing The Divide, my research has focused increasingly on the crisis of climate change and ecological breakdown. In recent papers, my colleagues and I have reported on data showing that the rich countries of the global North are overwhelmingly responsible for causing this crisis, while the consequences (in terms of social and ecological damages) fall hardest on the South. We can see this clearly in terms of emissions: the global North is responsible for 92% of all emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are causing climate damages.[3] And high-income countries are responsible for 74% of cumulative excess material use since 1970, which is driving biodiversity loss and other forms of ecological breakdown.[4] This represents processes of colonization – of atmosphere and ecosystems – and the consequences are playing out along colonial lines. In a recent paper we also find that high-income countries have overshot their fair-shares of the Paris Agreement carbon budget, and are set to owe $192 trillion in compensation to countries in the global South.[5]

6. On strategies for decolonization

In the penultimate chapter of The Divide, I describe some of the major structural changes that we must fight for in order to make the world economy fairer and ensure that global South countries have pathways to real sovereign development. I still stand by many of these principles, and I believe that progressive political movements in the global North should adopt them as core demands. But I also believe it is naïve to assume that the imperialist powers will agree to these changes any time soon. Global South countries should not just wait around to be decolonized. They can take active steps toward unilateral decolonization, to achieve economic sovereignty. We have developed this approach together with my colleague Ndongo Samba Sylla,[6] whose writings I recommend. As for development strategy, it will require using industrial policy and planning to overcome the obstacles presented by capitalism in the periphery.[7] The task of progressive social movements in the global North is to align with and support Southern struggles for emancipation and self-determination.

7. On “degrowth” and global justice

In the final chapter of The Divide, I explore an idea that I only really engaged during the final weeks of writing the book – an idea called “degrowth”. Degrowth describes how the wealthy economies of the global North need to reduce their use of the planet’s resources in order to stop ecological breakdown and also end imperialist appropriation from the global South, and how this can be done while at the same time improving people’s lives and achieving better social outcomes. The idea was new to me and still somewhat underdeveloped at the time. In the years since, it has advanced through a large scientific literature, international reports, and several new books. For readers who are new to the concept of degrowth, or who find it confusing or challenging, I wrote a full accessible account in my recent book Less is More. I have also written several articles which elaborate the empirical basis.[8],[9],[10],[11],[12] Ultimately, for me, degrowth is not just about ecology. It is about economic justice. It is about decolonization.[13] It is about the urgent need for post-capitalist transition.[14]

The changes we need are not reformist but revolutionary. Revolutions require liberating first our imagination – to think beyond the constraints of our existing economy and its ideologies, and to envision a post-capitalist world. But they also require the hard work of organizing and struggle.

Written for the Korean translation of The Divide and updated.

[1] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World development. See also: Hickel, J. and Sullivan, D. (2023). Capitalism, poverty, and the case for democratic socialism. Monthly Review.

[2] Hickel, J., Dorninger, C., Wieland, H., & Suwandi, I. (2022). Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Global Environmental Change. See also: Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: quantifying drain from the global south through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6).

[3] Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9), e399-e404.

[4] Hickel, J., O’Neill, D. W., Fanning, A. L., & Zoomkawala, H. (2022). National responsibility for ecological breakdown: A fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017. The Lancet Planetary Health, 6(4), e342-e349.

[5] Fanning, A. L., & Hickel, J. (2023). Compensation for atmospheric appropriation. Nature Sustainability, 6(9), 1077-1086.

[6] Sylla, N., and Hickel, J. (2024). Proposals for unilateral decolonization and economic sovereignty. Progressive International. See also Hickel, J. (2022). How to achieve full decolonization. New Internationalist.

[7] Hıckel, J., & Sullıvan, D. (2023). Capitalism, global poverty, and the case for democratic socialism. Monthly Review, 75(3), 99-113.

[8] Vogel, J., & Hickel, J. (2023). Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries. The Lancet Planetary Health, 7(9), e759-e769.

[9] Hickel, J., & Kallis, G. (2020). Is green growth possible?. New political economy, 25(4), 469-486.

[10] Hickel, J., Brockway, P., Kallis, G., Keyßer, L., Lenzen, M., Slameršak, A., ... & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2021). Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios. Nature Energy, 6(8), 766-768.

[11] Hickel, J. (2021). What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification. Globalizations, 18(7), 1105-1111

[12] Hickel, J., Kallis, G., Jackson, T., O’Neill, D. W., Schor, J. B., Steinberger, J. K., ... & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2022). Degrowth can work—here’s how science can help. Nature, 612(7940), 400-403.

[13] Hickel, J. (2021). The anti-colonial politics of degrowth. Political Geography, 88.

[14] Hickel, J. (2023). The double objective of democratic ecosocialism. Monthly Review.