Downstream: Infinite Growth Will Lead to Collapse w/ Jason Hickel

There's so much disagreement in politics right now, but one thing that basically everyone can agree on is that growth by GDP growth is good. The more growth, the better. And the real dividing line between left and right... Democrat and Republican, Labour and Conservative is what you do with that growth. But the growth bit, that isn't up for debate. As Keir Starmer recently put it, his agenda is growth, growth, growth. Today's guest could not disagree more.

with that proposition or with that general worldview. He thinks that the mindless pursuit of endless growth isn't just a bad thing, but actually it's leading humanity to catastrophe. It can only lead... to a very, very devastating outcome, not just for us, but for our planet too. His most recent book, Less Is More, How Degrowth Will Save the World, is fantastic. One of my favorite books the last five years. He's written about...

geopolitics, the political economy of development, foreign affairs, pretty significantly in recent years. You can find his work on Substack. I'm so looking forward to this conversation. Jason Hickel, welcome to Downstream.

Thanks very much. Nice to be with you. I have waited so long for this conversation. Me too. I have to say. I'm looking forward to it. Your work is fantastic. Your recent books are fantastic. Your sub stack is fascinating. We're going to cover so much material from all of those. I want to jump in right at the deep end, though, because, of course, you are one of the big voices out there on what climate collapse actually means, degrowth, the solutions, etc. We're going to go on all of that.

But let's start with the kind of diagnosis which underpins all of it. Where are we headed by 2100 with regards to climate change if we carry on with the present trajectory? Yeah, so the news on that is not good. According to the last IPCC report, which comes out periodically, our current trajectory is for about 3.2 degrees of global warming by the end of the century, above pre-industrial temperatures. Looking at current policy trajectory...

policies that have been implemented, it's about 2.7 degrees. And so a little bit more optimistic than previously, but still quite bad.

give or take about three degrees. Now that's actually, I mean, it sounds maybe not so bad, but it's actually a really devastating trajectory. So if you look at the science that's reviewed by the IPCC, looking at temperature thresholds like that, you're looking at, you know, 30 to 50% of species going extinct at three degrees. You're looking at, you know, 1.5 billion people displaced from their current homes.

You're looking at multi-breadbasket failures, meaning potentially food shortages in several parts of the world at the same time. Makes it more difficult to kind of cover it with redistribution and so on. So famine is more likely.

I mean, of course, to some extent, you know, adaptation can mitigate some of this, but the future looks fairly bleak on our current trajectory. It's really not a future we want to aim for. And 3.2, would that be the end of it? Or would that just... be the midpoint of something much worse? That's a good question. I mean, I think, I guess it really depends on what happens between now and then, right? Which is very difficult to predict. I mean, so these models go to 2100.

uh you know a few of them go beyond that um so it's it's a mixed bag depending on policy trajectories by then what's the worst case scenario by 2100 according to people like you know you know the various commissions that make these these kind of calls for the un or Look, I mean, it's difficult to say because the worst case scenarios kind of change as modeling improves. And so, you know, some will point to four or five degrees if we really just don't get our act together at all.

It's hard to say, right? I mean, of course, the political situation can also change as things heat up. Of course. And politics also transform. You could see much more radical change in response to that. And so I think that... Trying to predict worst case scenarios is a little bit difficult. I think that these kind of more, like what's the middle of the road scenario is much more realistic probably. So you're saying it's 3.2 by the end of this century?

beyond initially industrial levels. So to be clear, we're already what, 1.2 degrees warmer than we were? 1.2 or 1.3, yeah. Than the mid-19th century. That's correct. So, and already you can see that, you know, the effects of even just that are really devastating. Just look around you and look at, I mean, the kinds of impacts that especially have the global south, but the scale of the heat waves, you know, impact on crops, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this is not.

This is not easy even at this level. And so, you know, if you imagine significantly higher than that is going to be disastrous. It's really not a world we want to inhabit. In fact, you have some climate scientists like Kevin Anderson, one of the UK's most prominent climate scientists.

who routinely says that three degrees is actually not compatible with organized human civilization as we know it. Now, that doesn't mean that there's going to be mass death. I think that's an unlikely scenario, but...

It does mean that like a lot of the things that we take for granted about the organization of society today would not be feasible in such a world. So it's kind of a different planet. Like humans have not lived on such a planet before. And so that's really not, again, it's not a future we want to accept.

And it is, I mean, the main message that comes through all of the IPCC reports is we have to do everything possible to limit global warming as much as possible, right? Making every effort for 1.5 degrees. you know, and well below two degrees if 1.5 is not feasible. So every fraction of a degree really counts. So explain one thing to me. As far as I understand, the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are higher now.

So the amount of particles of CO2 in the air that we all breathe, they're higher now than they've been at any point, not just in the history of humankind, which is approximately, what, 300,000 years, but in the history of primates, right? And the last time that the planet had that concentration of CO2, sea levels were much, much, much, much higher than they are today. Tens of meters higher.

And yet the projections around rising sea levels by 2100, even with 3.2 degrees of warming above the mid-19th century, are only a couple of meters. Why is there that discrepancy? So this is not something that I'm necessarily qualified to talk about, I should say. But I think a lot of it has to do with the timescales on which the melting occurs, right? So...

You know, if you hit three degrees, let's say, then by 2100, you're going to have a certain level of sea level rise, which will be fairly devastating. But that... that the rising seas will continue after that, even if you stop at three degrees, right? So if no more warming occurs, sea levels will continue to rise in the centuries going forward. So that's kind of how it works. But you'd have to speak to a geologist for...

more expertise on that. And if the Greenland ice sheet melts, what is that? I mean, that's one of the kind of the big totems that people like yourself talk about. This would be a really singular moment, not just in the history of humankind, but you know, our planet.

What would the implications of that be, say, in the next century or two? Yeah, again, I mean, there's different models that predict different kinds of things. And so it's difficult to say with any kind of absolute accuracy. But I would say that... You know, if that occurs, you're looking at much faster sea level rise than existing models would project. That's something that we, you know, that would be like a pretty significant sea level rise event.

And the problem with really rapid rise like that is that you're looking at like making it makes it much more difficult to adapt, right? Now, in some rich countries, you might be able to manage adaptation fairly well, moving people away from coastal areas and so on. But there's going to be a lot of parts of the world where it's not feasible to adapt fast enough.

And there'll be a lot of suffering as a result. So, I mean, your productive capacity as an economy actually plays a lot into this. And this is one of the reasons why. Typically, global South nations are hurt a lot more from climate damages because they have a lot less productive capacity to reorient towards adaptation, right? Like if you just look at heat waves, I mean, some of this can be mitigated with air conditioning.

um but you have to be a country that has enough productive capacity and investment capacity to build out you know universal air conditioning infrastructure which is not feasible for a lot of people so this is one of the reasons why you look at like you know mass increase in uh in mortality likelihood probabilities in Global South countries under climate change scenarios.

And that dimension is terrible when you also consider the fact that it's overwhelmingly the rich countries that are responsible for driving this crisis. Research that we published in The Lancet a couple of years ago shows that... the global north countries, right? The countries of the imperial core are responsible for about 90% of all of the excess emissions.

um that are driving climate breakdown right so that's emissions in the atmosphere in excess of the safe planetary boundary of 350 parts per million uh 90 due to the global north and yet something like 92% of the economic costs are inflicted on the global South and about 98 to 99% of the climate change related deaths occur in the territories of the South. I mean, it'd be impossible to overstate how unjust that is, right? We're looking at climate change as effectively.

a process of atmospheric colonization by the rich countries, appropriating more than their fair share of our atmospheric commons. And then also, the effects are playing out along colonial lines. And so these colonial dimensions of the climate crisis, I think, are really important to highlight. For me, that's really what matters. And I think if we're not attentive to that fact, then we're kind of missing out. We're missing what's actually happening here.

I agree with that. And I think everything you've said there is very well evidenced. It's indisputable, in fact. But at the same time, does that sort of... undermine the reality of what climate change is going to mean for wealthy countries too. So places like California become uninhabitable. We might see desert in Southern Europe reach as high as places like Lisbon.

While in terms of quantitative numerical terms, the vast number of people that are impacted by this are poorer people in poorer countries, in places like, say, California, Portugal, Italy, Spain, actually millions upon millions of people. often very wealthy people included, are going to be very badly affected as well. 100%, yeah. I mean, if you look at the maps of climate damage, you're going to see that, you know, the real hotspots are in the global south.

And the Global North countries look comparatively okay. However, when you consider how bad things already are in places like Australia, the US, Southern Europe, et cetera, et cetera, then the question is not like, oh, these places are going to be fine.

These places are going to have real disaster, and it's just going to be amplified even all the more in the global south, right? So I think that, yeah, we certainly wouldn't want to downplay the extent to which damage is going to occur in the north.

And look, I mean, if you have a scenario where you have a breakdown of Atlantic circulation... then you're looking at potentially very dramatic climate changes in the UK in particular. This is actually, I mean, this is a possible scenario as well, where you have very severe cold fronts. basically occurring in the UK, making agriculture a lot more difficult to achieve and so on. I mean, this could make the UK very vulnerable.

So these are things we have to consider. And again, I think the main message from all of this is like, look, it's not about projecting futures of doom. These are all scenarios we can escape. It's just about emphasizing the urgency of... a very rapid decarbonization which has to really really be achieved now so i think for people who aren't necessarily familiar with that term atlantic circulation this is probably worth sort of teasing out if you look at a map

new york is basically on the same line as rome northern europe should be much much cooler but because of these geothermal patterns processes um I wouldn't call it geothermal. You'll give me the right word in a second. We actually have a much more clement climate than we should.

Again, I know you don't want to be pinned down on likelihoods, et cetera, because of course, if something doesn't come to pass, people say Jason Hickel doesn't know what he's talking about. See, he said this would happen and it didn't. And of course, that's a problem for people who are trying to sound the alarm on climate change all the time. How plausible is it, though, that actually we could see a dramatic shift in climate patterns?

for the UK, for Northern Europe. Because lots of people say, look, something like Nigel Farage, I think this summer we've had a lovely warm summer, right? You can get big fat grapes in England right now. Something like Nigel Farage is probably thinking, you know what? Yeah, climate change is probably quite bad, but...

For the UK, it's got pretty good net benefits, actually. How plausible is what you just said in response to that? I think there's a couple of things to consider. I mean, first of all, the climate impacts that could hit the UK. I mean, these risks are non... are like non-trivial, you know. And so, yeah, in terms of the way the Atlantic Ocean works, basically it circulates warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico, for example, up towards the UK and keeps the UK wet and warm.

in the absence, if the circulation breaks down, which can occur because of dynamics that are changed by the melting of the Arctic ice. then you could look at a situation where the UK becomes as frigid as regions at similar latitude in the Western hemisphere. Which would be where? Gosh, what is that? It's like probably Nova Scotia, maybe north of Canada, effectively. Yeah.

And so this is going to make, I mean, this is going to radically transform the landscape and the economy of the UK. I think the second main thing to consider here is that, is like, look, I mean, if we're talking about... Even if we're in a situation where there's no climate impacts in the UK, let's just say, for example, and all the climate impacts happen in the global south. I mean, are people aware of the extent to which the global north countries like the UK depends?

on imports from the Global South of land-based goods, et cetera, et cetera. If you're looking at a situation where land-based goods are dramatically affected in the Global South or labor supplies are dramatically affected, then, you know, this is going to be massively inflationary for the UK. You're talking about this is going to impose a consumption constraint on the UK, which will, of course, affect the economy very dramatically.

as well as people's living standards under existing capitalism. And so this idea that any of the global North countries would get off lightly or scot-free is just not true. I mean, to the extent that we live in a fully integrated global economy, which we have for the past 500 years under capitalism.

then that's just hallucination, right? We're all in the same boat, ultimately. With regards to the UK, absolutely, because we don't have the landmass to feed ourselves, etc. But could you make the argument that for someone like Russia...

Russia has actually, and Canada, Russia has this extraordinary situation where it has almost arguably a vested interest in accelerating climate change because it opens up trade routes in the Arctic, which are presently frozen. You probably get a lot more viable agricultural land.

and places like Siberia. Now, I know what you're going to say if Siberian, you know, permafrost goes, methane hydrate goes into the atmosphere, the planet gets even warmer still, et cetera, et cetera. But over the span of 100 and 150 years, you can see a rationale. amongst the sort of Russian political class and its elites where they say, who cares actually? You know, okay, Europe has problems, China has problems, India has problems. We're gaining from this.

Yeah. I mean, there are some models that suggest that could be the case. But again, I think these things are so unpredictable that you wouldn't really want to bank on that probably. And also furthermore, even if you are the Russian elite and you're thinking, oh, there's maybe things that we have to gain from a scenario like this. I mean, the geopolitical instability that will be caused is very unpredictable. You know, if you have mass displacement of people across...

key regions, like very heavily populated regions in the global south and massive disruption to production systems and so on. I mean, the kind of geopolitical instability that we're looking at is unpredictable. I mean, look at already what's occurring now with fairly low levels of migration.

that have been driven by recent geopolitical problems, you know, I mean, it throws politics into complete disarray and very unpredictable how this can play out. So again, for people who are gambling on geopolitical...

possibilities here. I don't know if it's a straightforward benefit, really. Let's talk about green growth. The response to everything we're discussing here from some quarters is that what we need to do is replace bad dirty, hydrocarbon-fueled growth with green growth. What would your response to that be? I mean, I think it's kind of an absurd... It's absurd on so many different levels, let's put it that way. It's interesting because it's...

It's a very common discourse. And of course, it seems to make sense, right? I mean, we start from the premise that growth is necessary for the economy, and everyone assumes that growth is automatically good. I mean, the discourse is basically... Growth is innovation, improvement, social progress, et cetera, et cetera. But this is not at all what growth actually is. I think it's quite important to point out.

defined by economists, which is what we're talking about here, is a very specific thing, which is an increase in total aggregate production in an economy as measured by market prices. Let's get this very clear. It's not about social progress. It's not about innovation. It's not about good things necessarily, etc., etc. It's aggregate.

output. And so according to this metric, you know, 1 billion pounds worth of tear gas is worth, is valued exactly the same as 1 billion pounds worth of healthcare or affordable housing or something like that. And when it comes to human welfare, clearly...

one of these is more important than the other, right? Like not all things are necessarily equal. And so clearly increasing aggregate production has no necessary relationship to human welfare or innovation, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like all that matters is what are we producing?

And who's benefiting from those things, right? Are we producing tear gas or are we producing healthcare? Is it available just to the rich or is it available to everybody, right? This is what actually matters for social progress. And so a much more reasonable way to think about the economy is not...

in terms of the way that, say, Keir Starmer and others currently think of it, which is we've got to grow the GDP all the time. This is actually crazy. The correct way to think about it is what are the social and ecological targets we want to hit? We want to, you know, we want to improve housing and education and health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. We want to improve soil quality and reduce emissions. These are the objectives we should set for the economy. We should plan production.

around achieving those things, right? So we should increase some forms of production to do those things, more affordable housing and high-speed rail and things like that, and a lot less unnecessary things like the tear gas or the weapons or...

you know, SUVs and fast fashion and so on, right? This is a much more rational way to think about the economy. So GDP, I think we have to start with this problem, which is that it's ultimately a metric that measures what is valuable to capital, right? And not what is valuable to humans.

to say nothing of the planet. So I think that it's a metric we have to discard. Saying that is not even particularly radical, but it definitely does not belong in any socialist discussion about the future of the economy. But to go back to the question of green growth, basically what they say is they want to keep everything the same.

They want to keep everything the same with the existing structure of production, the existing metrics of production, and make it compatible with... So decarbonize the system and keep all the cars, et cetera, et cetera, keep all the houses in the existing form. but switch to EVs, for instance, right? So technological change and decarbonization. Now, there's a problem with this, which is that in high-income countries, high-income countries have very high levels of energy use.

And this is actually one of the main problems we're facing right now, right? High-income countries have really high levels of energy use in excess of what is feasible in terms of decarbonization compatible with... the Paris Agreement targets. Now, the problem when you have really high energy use is that it takes a lot of effort to build out the necessary infrastructure and technological change to cover that energy use. So think about if you have really high energy use.

with unnecessary expenditures on mansions and private jets and so on, then you've got to build out the renewable energy infrastructure to cover all of that, which is a much bigger industrial undertaking than it would be if you had less energy use. And so...

Effectively, this is not compatible with sufficiently rapid decarbonization, according to the fair share agreements for distributing the carbon budget under the Paris Agreement. And so what high-income countries have to do, ultimately, is scale down. their energy use. Like less energy ultimately means, like less energy use means ultimately we can decarbonize a lot faster, you know, sufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. Now, some of that can be achieved through efficiency improvements.

Right. And we must invest in those urgently. Like we do need the technological change to achieve efficiency improvements like this. But it's also not enough. And we know this very clearly from empirical studies that at the same time as pursuing efficiency improvements, we also need to. scaled on unnecessary forms of production. Like the most energy intensive and least necessary forms of production.

like again, the fast fashion and the weapons and so on. We have to scale that down and this can reduce aggregate energy use in the economy and make it possible for us to achieve much faster decarbonization. So when we're looking at...

scenarios where rich countries can actually achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization, they include this element of reducing unnecessary production. So you're saying the Western rich countries, but if you look at somewhere like the UK, and I know a lot of these figures are... inflected by the fact that the UK has de-industrialized far more than a country, even like the US, for instance. The US makes far more goods that are domestically consumed than the UK does.

But if you look at the CO2 outputs per capita of the UK, I think it's about half what it is in the US. It's about half what it is in Australia. The EU generally has a lower CO2 output per capita than... than like i say the other anglophone countries canada us australia so so what level are we saying is optimal because

Actually, if Australia, the US and Canada got their per capita CO2 emissions down to the same level as the Europeans, I mean, that would be quite an achievement, wouldn't it? Or actually, does it need to go lower still? Basically, what country right now...

In terms of CO2 emissions per capita, would you say that's where the whole world needs to be? Well, it doesn't quite work that way, right? Because you have to consider the fact of the carbon budget, which... which doesn't work in terms of annual emissions, right? What counts as your total emissions over a period of time? And whether that's we start measuring from now or from 2020 or...

historically from 1990 or 1960 or even earlier. And the point is that the excess emissions of rich countries have blown their fair shares of all of these carbon budgets. And now they have a lot less to work with if we're going to split the carbon budget fairly. And so we know that even if we start from 2020, let's say, and measure carbon budgets from there, there's actually no country, there's no high-income country right now that is currently on track.

to reduce their emissions fast enough to stay within their fair share of Paris Agreement carbon budgets. That's a fact. They have to dramatically accelerate their mitigation. And there's nobody on track to do that. Even the best performers are off track on this. Who are the best performers?

I mean, the UK is actually one of them. I think Luxembourg is maybe one. Spain is doing fairly well. You know, it's Belgium, maybe, et cetera. I mean, I can't remember exactly who are the best here. But we had a study recently published in the Lancet Planetary Health that looked at...

at the best performing high income countries on this. And we found that on average, among those best performers, the ones that are achieving absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions, right, it'll take them about 200 years to reduce emissions to zero. I mean, think about that. That's the trajectory we're on. This is completely inadequate. And no one is taking this seriously. And so I think that...

That's really the challenge that we face, right? Much faster decarbonization is needed. And in order to achieve that, we're going to have to make some very serious changes. Now, look, there's actually, look, I mean, the biggest obstacle here to rapid decarbonization is, in fact, capitalism. We'll get to that. We can start that conversation now. So let me see if I can explain how this works. So under capitalism, production is highly undemocratic.

Right. So people like to think of capitalism as this is just a system of markets and businesses and trade. But that's in fact not at all what capitalism is about, right? Markets and businesses and trade existed for thousands of years before capitalism. They've taken many different forms and they're innocent enough more or less on their own, right? So what defines capitalism is that it's actually a fundamentally undemocratic...

Now, this may seem strange to hear for those of us who live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect our... officials from time to time, even if we acknowledge that these democratic processes are inadequate and corrupt. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, which shapes our civilization, determines the direction of our future, and is what we are engaged in.

Most of the time in our waking hours, right? Not even a pretense of democracy is allowed to exist. Production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital under capitalism. And that is specifically today, you know, the major...

financial firms, the commercial banks, the big corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investable assets. So these people who control finance in productive capacity... get to determine how to use our labor, how to use our planet's resources and our planet's energy, what to produce and then who benefits.

from the yields of production. And then, of course, they also get to determine the allocation of the surplus that we all generate, that we all generate with our labor and our production, right? So we don't get a say over what gets produced, for what purposes, who benefits, and what to do with the surplus.

highly undemocratic. Now, for capital, the purpose of production is not in fact to meet human needs or to achieve social progress, much less any ecological goals. That's not the objective. The objective is very singular, which is to maximize and accumulate. profit. Now, this leads to, as a result, perverse forms of production, right? So capital makes massive investments in producing things that are profitable to capital, things like SUVs and fast fashion and mansions and private jets.

and the military industrial complex, right? So we get massive production of those things and we get chronic shortages of obviously necessary things, right? Like affordable housing and public transit and renewable energy and so on. And so this is actually what explains our current

the double crisis that we face right now in the world, right, which is an ecological crisis driven by massive production to the point of overshooting six planetary boundaries, driving ecological breakdown. But at the same time, we have massive deprivation socially. You know, 2 billion people around the world live in food insecurity. I mean, something as basic as food security cannot be supplied by capitalism for everybody. 5 billion people, you know, lack access to necessary healthcare.

And this is obviously mostly in the periphery of the world system, but it's true also in the imperial core, in the high-income nations themselves, where I was just looking at data on this recently, actually. 100 million people in the USA and Europe live in food insecurity.

I mean, think about this. The richest countries in the world with massive quantities of productive capacity, massive total aggregate output and consumption, cannot even guarantee something as simple as food security to their citizens. The working classes in these regions are immiserated. despite the vast wealth that they produce, right? And so what explains this paradox is capitalism. It misallocates.

productive capacities, labor, resources, et cetera. And I'm getting to the point about climate. When it comes to the question of renewable energy transition, this is extremely important because we know what needs to be done, right? We need to scale down production of fossil fuels.

and increased production of renewables. Now, for a long time, economists insisted that as soon as renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels, this transition would take place more or less automatically. But that occurred almost 10 years ago. Renewables are now about 50% cheaper than fossil fuel gas. And yet the transition is not occurring at the necessary pace, right? Why is that? It's because capital does not in fact care about the price of energy. It cares about profitability.

Right. And so fossil fuels, despite being more expensive, are three to four times more profitable than renewables. So therefore, capital continues to invest massively in producing fossil fuels makes totally inadequate. investments in renewable energy production, even while the world is burning around us. This is absolutely crazy and gives you a sense for how insane, how illogical, how irrational the allocation of productive capacity.

is under capitalism, right? We cannot even achieve the thing that we know we need to achieve and which we are capable of achieving very quickly. We're not doing that.

And the reason is because we do not have control over our productive capacities. Now, if we did have democratic control over production, which is socialism, right, then we would be able to solve our ecological and social crises very quickly, right? I mean, it is not difficult to ensure... food security for all. It is not difficult to ensure universal healthcare. Renewable energy is very simple to develop and expand. We could deal with these crises, abolishing human deprivation.

and dealing with the climate crisis in very short order if we had democratic control over our productive capacities. And this is so crucial, I think. People will say, you know, capitalism is this great driver of innovation and we live in the best possible worlds. No!

This is lies. Look at the world around us. We live in a miserable world, actually. And capitalism, in fact, limits what we can achieve. It limits our capacity for innovation because innovation, we only get innovation that is profitable to capital, right? Not innovations that we actually need. for improving well-being and ecology. And it limits what we can actually do with our labor. We know what we need to be doing.

building the houses, building the renewable energy systems, building the public transit. But we are not permitted to do those things, even though we have the capacity to do it, because we don't have control over our productive capacities. This is crazy. And I think that's the core contradiction that must be overcome. And this is crucial, I think, for the climate movement right now. Right?

The climate movement has been very effective at bringing to attention the climate crisis as an emergency, building up a popular will to address it. And yet nothing is happening in terms of policy, right? Why? Because our governments... are aligned with the interests of capital. Our governments are capitalists. And until this sinks in for people and the reality becomes clear, which is that we must overcome.

capitalist control over production, if we want to address these crises, I think we're going to fail. And so we have to build the movements that are necessary to achieve that. And I think that's the main task that we face right now. so you talked about what matters to capitalists with regards to energy transition is the rate of profit and profitability rather than costs or the fact that renewables have they reach price parity with hydrocarbons a long time ago

California should be replete with solar arrays. It's very, very cheap. Some of the cheapest energy on Earth right now is solar energy in California. But it's not happened because of the reasons you've said. Another thing as well is that solar is deflationary. It's constantly falling in price. I'm not going to compare it to Moore's Law with computing because it's not as quickly and that's kind of a bit of a cliche, but it's a similar pattern. It's only heading in one direction.

And if you're an investor and you want to find returns, the last thing you want is a competitive market, which is highly deflationary. Great for consumers. Very, very bad for somebody trying to make a profit. And then you've also got the issue with regards to solar of what Marx, I think, called, and I haven't even thought about this time for such a long time, moral depreciation.

which is that you invest in a solar array, it's great, like I say, but the point is your competitor can then invest in another solar array in three years' time, which is even more energy efficient, and they're going to be able to undermine you on price. You've said all of this, but I'm just trying to tie it in with what Mark's...

Mark's pointed out. So I suppose there's a few other points I want to make, which is we're talking about decarbonisation now. Somebody like Bill Gates would agree with all of this, right? I read his last book on the climate crisis. He would agree with all of this and he'd say, you're absolutely right. This is an engineering problem. We need to decarbonize all of human life. I've broken it down. Concrete, or whatever it is, I think it's like 9%, glass is 6%, food is X amount.

Transport is X amount. You know, buildings are X amount generally. We just need to decarbonize these various spheres of human existence and we've basically solved the problem. And that's why he's investing in things like synthetic meat, et cetera. You know, the right all go.

berserk about this stuff online, but there's a reason why he's doing it. What would you say to that? He's saying, look, I agree. This is an engineering problem. We need to decarbonize aviation, cement, glass, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, food. Why is Bill wrong? I mean, Bill, I think, he's wrong because he doesn't understand capitalism, which is bizarre given that he's a capitalist. But it should be abundantly clear that capital is not making these investments.

I mean, and this is not just about renewable energy, right? It's about all forms of decarbonization. Capital is not making those investments. It's not even investing in, like, let's take appliances. We know that we need much more efficient appliances, which we actually have already. This is easy technology to develop, and we have to make sure that everybody has these technologies. We need phones and laptops.

et cetera, that last a lot longer. We need refrigerators that last longer that are more easily repairable, et cetera, right? We need to abolish planned obsolescence. This is very low-hanging fruit. This dramatically reduces energy use. It dramatically reduces emissions. It assists in rapid decarbonization, etc. But capital does not make these investments. Why? Because these investments are anti-profit, right? If our laptops and our phones...

and our refrigerators last twice as long, then the companies that make those devices have a lot less turnover and a lot less profit, right? This is antithetical to the interest of capitalism.

And so the same problem applies over and over again when it comes to the kinds of things we need to do. It's not profitable enough. And so therefore, the only way to overcome this is with some kind of public investment strategy.

Right. Public investment and public works. If capital is not building out, you know, high speed rail or integrated public transit systems or doing building installation because it's not profitable enough, we have to mobilize our capacities directly to achieve these things. Why should we sit around?

and wait for capital to decide that it is profitable, worthwhile to save the world, when our future and our present and our brothers and sisters, particularly in the global South, suffer. This is craziness. And so what's necessary is... is direct public investments in these things. And so what you're going to need is you're going to need a public investment vehicle, public investment banks that can align investment and production with national decarbonization objectives. And also...

social objectives as well, right? And alongside a public investment vehicle that can do that, you're going to need a public job guarantee and public works programs, right? Because again... These are not things that we can't achieve. They're things that we're just not achieving. To give an interesting example, I think, we have extraordinary engineering talent here in Britain. Our university is pretty some of the best engineers in the world.

Where do those engineers end up? Are they innovating new green technologies? Are they innovating integrated public transit systems, et cetera, et cetera, like on the scale that China has, for instance? No. They're working on advertising algorithms for social media companies. But this is where we allocate our labor because that's what's profitable, right? Imagine in a socialist situation where we can allocate labor instead towards what is most necessary. Think of how quickly...

we can address some of these crises. Now, but the other key thing here, and again, for high income countries, this is not true for low income countries. You know, we have to reduce less necessary forms of production. This is very clear. Again.

This is a consensus among scientists who work on climate mitigation scenarios now. So capital, crucially, cannot achieve this. Capital will not reduce a form of production that is profitable. You will not get capital voluntarily reducing fast fashion production or SUV production or private jet production because these are highly profitable forms of production. And so the only way to achieve that would be to...

to intervene directly to scale down these types of production. And so you would need something like a credit guidance framework, right, which was widely used in the middle of the 20th century, is a key socialist policy that would basically prevent

private investment from commercial banks, for example, from flowing to these target industries that you want to scale down, that we democratically agree we don't need and are damaging and should be scaled down. And so again, this is something that capital can't achieve. And so on two fronts, the fact that capital is not making investments and the necessary...

new forms of production, and also the capital continues to do harmful forms of production, not just fossil fuels, but others. This is a very serious obstacle. And to my mind means that's taken together. under the current arrangement, we will not be able to achieve our social and ecological objectives. So looming in the background to this whole conversation so far is China. We've talked about capitalism.

not being able to feed people, people living in income deprivation, food deprivation. Of course somebody might be watching and listening to this from a very different... place politically. I hope they are. Maybe they'll learn something. And they'll be saying, well, hold on, Jason. China has taken eight, nine hundred million people out of poverty in the last...

45 years. And that was through market mechanisms, integrations, the global economy. I'll come back to that in a moment. So that's the first point about China and how actually markets have managed to be used as an instrument of extraordinary poverty alleviation then secondly my sort of addition to that is is china a capitalist economy Because, you know, I've thought about this a lot. Some people call it state capitalist, which maybe it is. But it's an economy with markets, clearly.

But as Eric E. Lee put it, great academic on this stuff, he said, ultimately, political power in China is not driven by the interests of capital. Political power, agree or disagree, and sometimes it does terrible things, like the one-child policy. Political power in China is effectively, it resides with the Chinese Communist Party and its choices are imposed on resource allocation.

rather than the other way around. Capital decides resource allocation, which then politicians in our so-called democracies basically are apologists for, right? Or they might try and mitigate a little bit. In China, it's the other way. Other way around. Where do you sit on that? Because a lot of the things you're saying China is doing, right? We had DeepSeek recently was...

basically started by a guy who's a hedge fund manager. And he reallocated, I think, a significant number of his quants. Stop working in finance and go and work on this. this LLM AI product I'm trying to build. You know, he bought all of these Nvidia GPUs and so on. I think we should be doing that in this country. So what's your view in China with regards to all the issues we've touched upon so far?

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely say that, look, it's difficult to characterize China as capitalist or socialist because it's changed over history, right? I mean, clearly during the Mao period, it was very clearly a planned socialist economy. There were market reforms that were...

implemented in the 80s and 90s, there's big debates about how good or harmful or necessary those were. And this could be a whole podcast episode in and of itself. And it's something I'm actually very passionate about exploring. But that's a separate story. But I would say that now, and certainly since the 18th National Congress in 2012, there's been a very decisive shift back towards socialism. And we can see...

key elements of socialism in China's economy in the following ways, right? First of all, something like 20 or 30% of their GDP is produced by state-owned enterprises. I mean, so... there's public control over the commanding heights of the economy. And that includes, by the way, finance. And this is actually really crucial. This is so important, I think. People need to understand that finance is not a neutral part of the economy, right? Finance is what determines everything about production.

It is the allocation of finance that determines production. Production cannot occur without financial investment. And so under capitalism, finance is basically just our surplus that's guided towards new forms of production.

When capital has control of production, then they invest in whatever is most profitable to them. And this is what our financial sector does. And this is why we have very perverse forms of production. In China, the finance sector is aligned.

with China's national development objectives and the five-year plans and so on, right? So when China decides, you know what, we want to achieve rapid development of renewable energy technology, EVs, AI, whatever it might be, then they can turn on a dime like that.

achieve the necessary investments and very rapidly accelerate production and innovation in these ways, in ways that the West cannot because they're not profitable enough. So China doesn't, I mean, the national investment banks don't care about profitability. This is crucial, right? And this is why, I mean, China has been able to make massive investments in renewable energy technology to the point where now they produce 90% of renewable energy technologies in the world, 80 to 90%.

of the necessary materials required for renewable energy around the world, right? They're installing renewable energy capacity in the last several years more than the rest of the world combines. I mean, the scale of this is astonishing. China's responsible also for about 30% of the world's reforestation over the past several decades. I mean, reforestation, by the way, is a zero profit.

It's a loss-making enterprise. But China can allocate labor and productive capacity towards those objectives, paying people wages to plant trees, right, regardless of profitability, because that's part of the national plan. This gives you a sense for the power of industrial policy and public control over finance. And by the way, not long ago, nobody saw this coming in China. China did not have these capacities. Now China has the best EVs in the world.

They've outstripped Western EV technologies, right? And so this is a testament to the power of planning and industrial policy. And I think that you look at the Western nations and they're scrambling. The Biden administration recognized what was happening here.

And they did their best to implement their own industrial policy. People realize now that we need industrial policy to solve basic problems. But the U.S. industrial policy was just absolutely pathetic. I mean, it basically boiled down to saying...

We're going to throw a bunch of public money to de-risk certain investments in certain sectors and basically just line the pockets of capitalists to do the things we hope that they're going to do. There's no guarantee they're actually going to do them, but the U.S. is incapable of thinking.

beyond just the profits of capital, when what is necessary is direct mobilization of productive capacities. Again, we have more than enough productive capacity to solve our social and ecological problems. It is simply a question of who controls it. Okay, so that's as far as China goes. But of course, there are elements of the Chinese economic system that may seem like not the socialism that we might want to see. For example, you know...

For the majority of workers, their direct experience in the workplace is working with a capitalist firm. So a wage labor relation with a capitalist firm, right?

And so for a lot of people, they would want to see like democratization of private firms. And I'm actually in that camp, although I think that under Xi Jinping, there's actually moves in this direction. And one of the ways we've seen this is... is recent policies to ensure that any firm that has, I think it's more than three Communist Party members as workers in the firm, they get to set up a CPC.

units inside the firm that then has some governance say, right? And so groups of Communist Party members inside firms. can actually participate in the governance of private firms. And for firms that are above a certain number of employees, it's actually mandatory that they have one of those. And so in these respects, there's increasing democratization in private firms. I think that...

I mean, my sense from speaking to people there is that this is going to continue to increase. So we'll see. I think that, I mean, China's clearly in a process of, a long-term process of socialist transformation.

But for right now, there's plenty that we can learn in terms of their investment strategies. What do you make of sort of right now Western interpretations of what's going on in China? Because you said they have these national investment banks that they don't have to actually find returns on.

investment. They don't have to generate profits. And of course, that's the criticism that comes from people at the Financial Times. They're going to fail because they're not making profitable investments. They're not maximizing profitability. That's precisely the point. It's precisely the point. And then at the same time,

time and i i'd love your take on this maybe it's cope or maybe it's ideological i don't know they look at china and they say oh it's only growing by five percent in terms of gdp this year And you think, well, because of demographic aging and because of falling fertility rate for a very long time, the labor market's actually shrinking. Unlike the UK, the labor market in China is shrinking. It's only just started, but it's...

It's there. We're not there in Britain. And yet you have 5% growth, which, of course, is entirely the result of productivity growth, which I know you're talking about degrowth. We're going to probably come back to this, actually. But productivity growth is... probably a good thing. You want to be able to produce more with less. So how come the FT thinks that 5% productivity growth is bad and it means that China is quote unquote over?

I think the predictions about China in the Western press are actually hilarious. It's amazing. If you think back to the question of the housing bubble that occurred in China, right? Like suddenly, China started investing and producing a lot less in housing. And when this happened, by the way, in the West, this was a massive economic crisis that threw millions of people into unemployment and caused social misery.

And so they were like, ah, this is the moment we're going to see economic crisis and collapse in China. And they're just like, you know, smacking their lips at this prospect. And then it doesn't happen. Why? What actually occurred in China during this time was that China realized, wait a second, we've been increasing investment in housing and infrastructure. We actually don't need as much of that anymore since we've met.

requirements in a lot of ways. And so we're going to scale down this particular form of production and we're going to reallocate production towards other strategic industries. which they did, including things like EVs and renewable technology, etc. And so they planned the reduction in one sector to increase production in other sectors.

which they did because this is aligned with social needs and strategic objectives. And the Western press just could not understand this, right? Because for them, every sector must grow all the time.

And it's actually ludicrous to imagine scaling anything down. I think this is ridiculous. And this is important, right? Like under socialism, you can do this kind of thing where you scale up certain sectors and scale down sectors. I had this really...

fascinating interaction once with the president of Cuba, where, I mean, he doesn't know who I am. Somebody introduced me as a guy who writes about growth, right? And before I could say anything, because I was going to say, well, it's more complicated than that.

You know, he was like, let me tell you something about growth. He said, Fidel would always tell us, growth is the obsession of the capitalist class. GDP growth is not something that socialists should care about. Socialists should care about increasing production of what is necessary for human needs and well-being.

and ecological objectives. Fidel, by the way, was pro-ecology. And decreased production of harmful and less necessary things. And this is amazing, right? He was like, this is the correct approach to a socialist economy. Which is exactly what socialist post-growth has been saying for a long time. Like this is fully aligned with socialist principles. And so I think that China realizes that. And this is evidenced by the fact that.

In China, they've actually begun demoting GDP as an objective for their officials. It used to be... that for major officials in cities and counties and so on, then GDP growth would be one of their core performance objectives. They're actually removing that and replacing it with different kinds of targets, like more specific social and ecological targets, including... Like things like cleaning up rivers. So cities and counties that abut.

major rivers that are polluted and need to be cleaned up, like part of their performance objectives now are cleaning up those rivers for their share of it, rather than just increasing GDP growth perpetually. And so, look, I think that China is much more advanced on this question than we are.

It makes Keir Starmer just look like a buffoon. I mean, because he just continually says the only thing that Britain needs is GDP growth. This is actually a ludicrous way to think about the economy. Yeah, growth, growth, growth, in his own words. But I think there's a really interesting... comparison to be made between renewable energy developments in Europe and in China right now, right? So there was just an article in the Financial Times about Spain.

So Spain is fascinating because they've been actually doing a lot of renewable energy development. But as a result, solar power, which is their main source, is super cheap, like you mentioned earlier, right? To the point where it's so cheap that the capitalist development firms that are doing it can't make any profits anymore. And they are shutting down.

planned development as a result, jeopardizing the government's climate mitigation targets. Whereas China has no such problem. It doesn't matter whether... it's profitable or not. They actually want the energy to be cheap. They can build out the renewable energy capacity totally regardless of whether it's profitable. And so you can see how in a capitalist society, we're hamstrung, we're hostage effectively.

to the interest of capital. Whereas when you have public control over investment and production, this is not so big a concern. Would you make the point that capitalism, capitalist, capital doesn't want competition? Again, somebody watching this from the right, prime markets, they'll say, no, capitalism's good because it's competition and that brings prices down. If you look at the tail end of the 19th century, often referred to as the Long Depression, 1870s, really through to the...

yeah, the 1890s, co-terminus with the Second Industrial Revolution, actually, there is very low growth across much of Europe. As far as I understand... Partly because there's such high levels of competition within all these new industries and capital hasn't really worked out ways to form monopolies, et cetera, et cetera. That doesn't really happen until the beginning of the 20th century. Obviously, a massive increase in living standards because you have these workers' revolts in the tail of...

1848, Paris Commune, et cetera, the burgeoning workers' movements of the late 19th century. So on paper, this was a terrible time for Europe. But actually, you look at the cities we built. the improvements in life expectancy, child mortality rates collapsing. In no way does that map onto sort of GDP data. I mean, is that fair? Is there actually a bit of a historical example for the things you're talking about? Actually, you know what?

There's several empirical studies on this, actually, which are really interesting. And it's amazing to me this doesn't get more attention. But we have a real historical experiment. Because in the 1980s... we had socialist economies covering quite a lot of the world population, right? Before the end of 20th century socialism in most countries in the 1990s. And so there's several studies that look at the performance.

of the socialist countries versus the capitalist countries in the periphery of the world system at any given level of development. So GDP per capita, right? And what we can see is that there's a statistically significant... advantage that the socialist countries have across almost all social indicators. So everything matters in terms of life expectancy, mortality rates, hospital developments, gender equality, et cetera, et cetera. Looking at...

more than a dozen social indicators that are available from that time, you can see that the socialist countries outperform their capitalist counterparts at any given level of GDP per capita. What that indicates to me is that socialism is much more efficient. at transforming resources and energy, right? Production into social outcomes, right? Because again,

it's not hampered by the interest of capital. It can organize production around achieving those goals. And this is why, you know, even like very low-income socialist economies in the 20th century were able to outstrip the performance, the social performance. of middle-income capitalist countries that have a lot higher GDP per capita because they were able to direct production toward where it was most necessary. I think that Cuba is an interesting example. Of course, Cuba is under brutal black...

blockade by the US for decades. And so its development has been hampered by that. And yet, nonetheless, Cuba has a life expectancy that exceeds that of the United States with something like 80% less income per capita, right? So again, the point here is that what matters is what you are producing and how you allocate resources and access to yields. That really makes a difference. But there's lots of examples you look at.

China and India. I mean, they both became like the Chinese Revolution and Indian independence happens more or less at the same time. Over the next period, between 1950 and 1980, China's GDP growth... income per capita growth, which is really important for a low income country. This represents increasing consumption, particularly in a socialist economy, was more than double that of India's during the same period. Right. And so this idea, again, that like.

As a development strategy, capitalism is really good at generating growth. It's not even true on those terms. Actually, planning the necessary production that you're going to need, even under blockade, which China was. is very effective. When was China under blockade until? Until Nixon? Until the 70s? Yeah, I would say until at least the 80s. I'm not exactly clear on precisely the date, but yeah. And of course the sanctions are ramping up now, again, by the US.

against China. So this is an interesting one because I think, again, most people from the right or people who haven't even thought deeply about these things would say, well, hold on, that doesn't quite sound correct to me because I was around for the fall of the Berlin Wall and I remember people trying to leave the East German Republic, the DDR, trying to go west.

And yes, it's true that China outperformed India, but actually that's a consequence of it being a Confucian civilization. Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, all of these countries, and they all have... quite different models, Japan as well, although it's not Confucian, have all done pretty well over the last...

century in different ways. So actually that makes them sort of, it's kind of obviously a big racial undertone there, but it makes them civilizationally different to South Asia. We'll come back to that in a moment maybe. I think the German one's really interesting because there's a great quote about about socialism and i can't remember who said it it was an american socialism is such a dumb idea even the germans couldn't make it work which is quite funny in a way um east germany was a successful

on many metrics, but it was outperformed by West Germany on a hell of a lot too. And I think on life expectancy, they would have been broadly the same. Anyway, this is the sort of challenge I would throw down to you, and it's a political problem for economies like the DDR, is that even if for the average German in the DDR, life was better than it was in West Germany, and we know it wasn't for a bunch of reasons because of...

lack of energy resources. They were being assets stripped by the USSR whilst West Germany was having assets poured into it by the US, et cetera. We know all of that. But a problem was that for... The petty bourgeois, for instance, for highly skilled tradespeople, for doctors, for engineers, rightly or wrongly, a certain class of highly skilled worker thought...

I can leave the DDR and I can actually make a better life for myself in West Germany. And actually, that's true because of their class status, their class position, even though they... They'd been funded and educated because of a socialist system. They were right to think, actually, I can have a better standard of living in West Germany, given what I do, my skills, and so on. Isn't that a problem for the kinds of economies you're talking about?

because of open borders and labor flows and whatnot. Even if for the average... East German, life in East Germany was better than it was in West Germany. You're always going to have this particular substrate of intelligent, highly qualified people wanting to leave because actually a socialist democratic economy isn't in their rational sense. Yeah, so, look, I think that Germany's not a very good example here because, well, for the reasons you mentioned, but also because...

Because, you know, I mean, West Germany was literally like the imperial core, was integrated into the imperial core. And East Germany was like the periphery of the periphery, right? So, I mean, clearly, like... life is going to be better in West Germany where you have access to a lot more resources and income, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know if that's a very good example. But let's take...

Let's take the East Asian economies. But there was that phenomenon of highly talented technicians, doctors. They were going to the West. And that's always going to be a problem, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's a... Look, I mean...

We have to be clear that all of the socialist states were operating under imperial encirclement. They were under blockade, they were under sanctions, they were under... constants, threats of coups, assassinations, etc., etc. I mean, the entire second half of the 20th century, the U.S. devoted massive amounts of military and intelligence resources to overthrowing

and to crushing socialist movements before they took power, and when they were in power, to crushing their economies. I mean, this is very well documented. It's effectively World War III, right? We call it the Cold War.

which is strange to me because of course it was in fact a hot war. I mean, look at what they did to Vietnam, for example, or to North Korea. I mean, we're looking at like the incineration of entire societies. In fact, In fact, the kind of violence that was visited upon Vietnamese peasants and North Korean peasants during U.S. military campaigns is in fact the precise precursor to what they're now doing to Gaza. Total destruction, right? That's what they...

did to socialist economies, anyone who tried to do this. Over and over again, we see that the US and its Western allies intervenes in the periphery of the world system to crush liberation movements like this. And so that's what they were dealing with. And so therefore, you know... their material conditions often were not easy. And, you know, under those conditions, then yeah, sure, you're going to get some people defecting, isn't it? A lot of people, of course, also do stay because they...

they are ideologically committed to building a liberated nation. Well, China's managed that, right? I think China's a good example. I mean, and this is really intriguing because, you know, if you believe the propaganda... Actually, what should be happening is China has all these really talented comp sci people, engineers, medical people, entrepreneurs, tons of them. They should all be leaving China. And yet highly wealthy individuals are leaving because of Xi.

But actually, I think if you look at, for instance, the number of US trained Chinese PhDs, they're going back voluntarily. I mean, that's a really interesting thing because that's kind of not meant to happen. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, so I think that's a good example. Look, but to address the question of the East Asian tigers, because this is actually an important one, I think. Everyone will say, you know, like... You know, the East Asian tigers in Japan are very good models of capitalist developments in the periphery. But in fact, I think we have to understand what was particular about these countries, right? First of all, in the rest of the periphery...

The U.S. intervened violently to crush liberation movements. And then in the 1980s and 1990s, imposed structural adjustment programs on these countries, in most countries across the Global South. What they did was they effectively... dismantled the possibility of industrial policy and planning and public provisioning and public finance, etc., etc. I mean, this was like radical neoliberal...

austerity and other market reforms imposed on countries with devastating economic effects, by the way, reorganizing production in these economies, not around national human needs and development, but rather around consumption and accumulation in the imperial core. For the East Asian Tigers, what we today call the East Asian Tigers, the U.S. did not do that. And in fact, supported them. We're talking about Korea, Taiwan, et cetera, right? And Japan after.

the U.S. occupation, supported them in using state-led development policy. What is today South Korea, at some point, had the highest percentage of public control over investable assets of any country outside of the actual communist states. I mean, very high levels of public control over investments. And so state-led development policy, we have always known, is the most effective way.

to achieve development. And it was very successful in the East Asian Tigers. Why did the U.S. make an exception for these countries? The reason is because ever since the Chinese Revolution, in the late 1940s, the US has done everything possible to encircle China, and Taiwan and South Korea and Japan are instrumental to that objective. They are today completely covered in US military bases. The largest foreign military base in the world is stationed in...

in South Korea, Camp Humphreys. And South Korea alone hosts 60 US military bases and installations with missiles pointed towards China, right? So the development of these particular small capitalist states... was part of a process of purposefully integrating them into the imperial core for geopolitical considerations to surround revolutionary China.

Sticking on this, I find this stuff really fascinating. You look at Taiwan and the state-led industrial policy it had with regards to creating TSMC, which is now the world's leading microprocessor manufacturer. If a Labour government, if Keir Starmer said, we're going to do basically what Taiwan did with regards to TSMC.

The right-wing press in this country would call it communism. They would say, and by the way, it was broadly, well, it's kind of a John McDonnell-style industrial policy. I don't want to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

Basically, it was far to the left of the kind of cliches they generally present with regards to that part of the world. You mentioned South Korea as well, but Singapore. You know, if you look at Harold Wilson in the mid-1960s when he's the prime minister, rightly or wrongly, he's calling Lee Kuan Yew a social democrat. Now on law and order, on crime, obviously he's a deeply conservative man, but there are clear policies on things like state investment in terms of the public ownership of land.

They have a quasi-Georgist kind of set up in Singapore, just kind of world. Again, if you went out there tomorrow and said, I'm the labor leader and we're going to bring all of land into public ownership because actually it's this hugely important factor of production. And guess what? Nobody's creating any more of it.

you know you'd be torn to shreds by the right-wing press so i think you're right there's clearly a massive exception that goes on with with that part of the world but you said something a moment ago which was really powerful jason you mentioned palestine and i just want to track back a bit

We think of the sort of paradigmatic example with regards to war and destruction as being the Second World War, Stalingrad, Dresden, right? But actually, you're right. In terms of munitions that are being dropped on civilian areas... It's hard to beat Vietnam, Laos, North Korea. I mean, the Korean War is insane when you look at the amount of munitions that were dropped on that poor country. The only recent analog, actually, to Korea is Gaza.

This is a tiny strip of land which has basically had more than twice as much munitions dropped on it since 2023. Hamburg, Dresden, and London combined across the entirety of the Second World War. This tiny strip of land, the only analog in the 20th century is... his career in Vietnam. So what ties Gaza to those two conflicts, which were, you know, in the 1950s and 60s, respectively? Yeah, look, I think there's a very close connection, actually.

I think that we have to see the destruction of Palestine, the genocide in Palestine, as a continuation of a long backlash against anti-colonial struggle across the Global South, which is actually essential to the organization of...

of capital accumulation on a world scale. So let me explain what I mean. So we talked before about how, like, what is capitalism? It's about maximizing accumulation of profits for capital. Now, in order to do that, then the capitalist states... in the imperial core in particular, need a massive quantity of cheap labor and cheap nature. This is actually essential to maximizing profits. You have to suppress the prices of labor and nature, resources. Now, there's only so far that you can do that.

within an isolated or bounded economy. You might choose to exploit your domestic working class and exploit your domestic resource base to the sufficient quantities necessary to maximize profits. But very quickly, you're going to run into very severe contradictions, right? There's going to be revolutionary forces that push against you from the working class and your ecological base will be degraded.

undermine the very possibility of your production. So immediately with the development of capitalism in England and the rest of Western Europe, there were incredible pressures. for capital to find some kind of outside, an external frontier, where it could appropriate cheap labor and cheap nature with impunity and repress and destroy any revolutionary struggles against it.

without worrying about things like human rights and so on. And so the rise of capitalism in Western Europe is coterminous with the rise of the European colonial projects. which was a project effectively of organizing production in the periphery around, again, not around national development, but around accumulation and consumption in the core states. Of course, overwhelmingly for the benefit of the ruling classes there.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, there was an extraordinary rebellion against this world system. Movements across the periphery succeeded, in fact, in overthrowing their colonial occupiers. and went about, and they were inspired by the way, by socialist principles and also nationalist development principles. And they went about reclaiming productive capacities and reorganizing them around.

local human needs and national development. Land reform, capital controls, industrial policy, planning, unions, et cetera, et cetera, were key to this project. This posed a very severe threat to capital accumulation in the core states. right? Western Europe and its settler colonial offshoots like the USA, Australia, etc. Because the more the global south produces and consumes for itself,

right, the more it cuts off access to cheap labor and cheap nature for the core states, making capital accumulation in the core very difficult to achieve. So the crisis of the 1970s that hit the US and the UK in particular... The crisis of stagflation that we all know about was largely caused by a rising supply price from the periphery. It was no longer possible for them to get the quantities of cheap labor and cheap nature they used to obtain for the past several hundred years.

And therefore, they experienced inflation and also a decline in their growth rate. This put capitalism in a very, very difficult position, especially because at the same time, wages are rising domestically, given the power of organized labor.

So at this point, capital in the core faces a choice, a fork in the road. Either they can accept decolonization and also social justice at home and shift to a post-capitalist economy where... profit maximization and capital accumulation are not the core objectives, right? Or they can find some way to maintain capital accumulation by restoring the imperial arrangement. And they opt hardcore for the latter, right? And we know that this involves...

coups against progressive and socialist governments across the global South, including democratically elected governments. And there's dozens of examples of this. And then also the imposition of structural adjustment programs. And so we have to understand the violence that was... imposed on the South as an attempt to re-cheapen labor in nature in the periphery in order to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core, right? And so in this sense...

Capital requires this imperial arrangement, this kind of colonial arrangement, right? And the violence that we saw against Vietnam and North Korea and Laos and the encirclement of China is all organized around that objective. You want to prevent...

national development, right, prevents economic sovereignty because you need to maintain them in positions of subordination in your supply chains, right? Now, when it comes to Israel, the same logic applies. The U.S. took an interest in Israel in the 1960s. Why? Because at the time, Arab nationalism and pan-Arabist and pan-Africanist movements in the Middle East and North Africa were very strong.

These were movements towards socialism. They wanted to reclaim productive capacities. It was about national liberation. The U.S. was not willing to accept the prospect of a liberated Middle East because that would impose very, and by the way, this is the center of the world.

at the hinge of Africa and Asia and Europe, as this would impose very serious constraints on their ability to appropriate resources and labor from this region. And so they needed to intervene to crush these movements, and Israel was a crucial attack dog. in doing so, right? The U.S. armed them to the teeth and they were sent after liberation movement leaders. They bombed.

The frontline states repeatedly destabilizing them, forcing them to direct productive capacity away from national development towards defense, etc., etc. Israel has been crucial to U.S. imperial strategy in the region. for the past 50, 60 years. And this is exactly why, to this day, the U.S. is supporting, actively supporting and arming the Israeli genocide against Palestine.

Right. Because they cannot stomach the possibility of a liberated Palestine because a liberated Palestine removes their key proxy in the region. and opens up the door to liberation movements across the rest of the Middle East. And that is highly antithetical to the interests of Western capital accumulation. And it's very clear that they are willing to go to extraordinary extents.

to prevent that occurring, to the point of debasing their own claims about human rights and international law, et cetera, et cetera, completely flattening an entire society, extraordinary displays of hypocrisy against massive... popular opposition. Why are they doing this? Because they understand that this is in the interests of the capitalist class.

I think that's the key here. People will fall back on arguments about, oh, it's the power of AIPAC in US elections and so on, which is true. I mean, that's true. That's a real force. I would go further. It's not just AIPAC. I think large parts of the US state have been... infiltrated by israel i mean i think that's pretty obvious i think the same is true in this country as well i agree with you though that's only one variable next to a much bigger one which is u.s empire

Quickly, I mean, you talked about the Cold War being this Third World War, and I agree with that. And often people think about that Third World War as being between, you know, communism and capitalism. But actually, many of these countries, like Arbenz, I think, in Guatemala or Mossadegh in Iran.

They just wanted national social democracy. They wanted the same thing that the Labour government was offering, broadly speaking, in a number of ways, to this country in the 1945 general election. That's what they wanted. But as you've said, the whole economic settlement, which allows... Europe and North America at that time.

to do so well meant that social democracy, which was being permitted to the electorates of the global north, simply couldn't extend that far. And you've talked about some of the liberation movements which were undermined. I think it's really important to put some color on this. I'll give you two examples quickly. You know all this.

better than I do. But for our audience, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or what you speak with Zaire, you have a gentleman who's the national leader of that country called Patrice Lumumba. He's murdered, as I understand it. His entire body was disintegrated, dissolved in a bathtub of acid. Secondly, Mohammed Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, he was removed in a coup when he died to this day.

He's buried in his front room. He wasn't allowed a public funeral because, of course, in sheer cultures, the mourning of somebody's passing, that's quite a powerful moment. And often it would mean that many people would go out into the streets. I think to this day, the largest assembly. at a funeral of anyone ever is Ayatollah Khomeini's. That would have been a potential flashpoint politically. So this man is literally buried in his front room.

That is what empire looks like. So people talk about how evil the Soviet Union was or whatever. Somebody being dissolved in a bathtub of acid, somebody being buried in their front room. These were two democratically elected leaders. Now on...

On that part of the world, you're saying just how important it is. And this is going to actually lead me to a question about what empire we're looking at. Because you talk about the West, you talk about the capitalist economies, but I wonder if it's better labeled as just American empire.

The role of Israel is really interesting. So if you look at the Suez crisis in the 50s, Britain, France, dependent on oil coming from West Asia. They had to keep control of the Suez Canal. Of course, Britain no longer had that. And they were worried about Arab nationalism basically stopping the flow of energy supplies into Europe. So they have to get rid of Nasser. And they try and get rid of NASA with the Israelis. The Israelis say, look, we'll concoct some weird...

Pretext, we'll invade, we'll secure one side of the canal, and then the British and French can go in to calm the situation down, and actually it's just an occupation of Egypt. The Americans find out, and within 24 hours the whole thing... dies. And what's interesting is Eden backs down on this. I only found this out recently. That's on the UK Prime Minister. Until then, a very storied political career.

Very handsome guy. Hollywood good looks. Foreign secretary during the Second World War. I think he fought in the First World War. But his entire... career and legacy collapses in this week-long period, the Americans literally say to Eden, if you do this, we will put sanctions on you.

This is less than a decade after the Second World War, right? So people talk about the special relationship. They were going to put sanctions on Britain if Britain basically overstepped with regards to what was now American Empire. And this... This basically starts, I think, in 45, 46, when the Brits say, or maybe even 44 a bit earlier, but around then, the Brits basically say to the Americans, we can't pacify Greece. You're going to have to do it.

We can't manage the whole of the European neighbourhood anymore. It's going to require American soldiers. And I think that's probably the moment where... That's probably the birth of American empire. Now I know some people can say it's 1940 or 41, but I think in Europe, that's the birth of American empire. So enough of me talking, looking at the Suez Canal.

looking at US support for Israel since the 50s, looking at basically Britain saying we can't manage Europe anymore right at the end of the Second World War. Is it right to call it the West or the capitalist countries? Because it feels to me increasingly we should just be talking about US empire, especially in a world where the European states don't really have much sovereignty anymore. I mean, that's just...

Glaringly obvious. During the Cold War, during the Third World War, you know, you could kind of pretend it wasn't true. But I mean, now it's just indisputable.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, I think that those, look, I mean, they're clearly in a block together and they act in concert when it comes to their position in the world system. And so in that sense, I think that, you know. The world system theorists are correct when they call this a kind of united core. But there's clearly inequalities within it, right? And I think that, I mean, now it's apparent to everybody now that European states are basically vassals of the U.S.

and have very little sovereignty of their own. And it's remarkable to me that people don't actually recognize this fact, except for one European leader, which is Macron, who I actually generally despise. But he's one of the few people who actually seems to recognize the fact that...

that Europe lacks sovereignty and needs to try to build it. He clearly doesn't have the necessary powers to do so, but at least he mentions it from time to time. It's interesting to see. But in terms of the role that Britain plays, I mean, look, I think that, and first of all, I should say,

Just to confirm this point, when we talk about like, this is Western countries or the UK and Britain, we're clearly not talking about all people in these countries, right? Obviously, there's class dimensions in these countries. These actions against... the global South, against liberation movements in the South, are conducted by the ruling classes of these countries. And this is not actually, in fact, in the interests.

of their working classes. And I think it's really important to understand international dimensions here. We need solidarities between the working classes of the core countries and our brothers and sisters in the periphery towards liberation. I will say also that I think that the UK does play its own roles in some cases. Like if you look at Kwame Nkrumah, just to give an example here, he was the first independent leader of Ghana. He was a key figure in the non-aligned movements.

in the middle of the 20th century. He famously wrote the book Neocolonialism, describing what he had seen being done to his comrades at the time who were being offed in coups and assassinations and so on. And in the UK... was responsible for getting rid of him through a coup. There was a UK backed coup there, right? And this is amazing because most British people don't know this fact. I mean, I taught at LSE for years and I would bring this up in every...

in every one of my lectures at some point. And almost nobody knew this fact. So I think there's actually like a lack of awareness about the extent to which the UK played direct roles here. And we can see, of course, it's happening right now with Gaza. the UK is directly participating in providing intelligence and support to the Israeli regime. But yeah, but I mean, clearly within the core, there are these hierarchies and the US is colony shots. That's definitely apparent.

And then you have a subordinate set of vassal states, specifically countries like, say, Ukraine. I think Japan is another example of the South Korea, Taiwan. These are subordinate elements of the core states. But I wonder, I mean, I would have agreed with that five years ago. And I just wonder now, is that necessarily true? Look at, for instance, Israel. So I think Israel's endgame is the destruction of any other... potential peer power in west asia right so that basically means iran and turkey

That is the end game, right? I think people really need to be serious about this. Iran and Turkey. First Iran, and then in 15 years' time, it'll be Turkey. They need to let Syria balkanized, weak, destroyed. Yes. And what that means, and that's in the interests of US empire, like you say, because you cannot have strong peripheral powers, and certainly not strong peripheral powers potentially in the orbit of China.

But what that means is that you're going to have millions of refugees coming to Europe. Millions, tens of millions, far more than we have at the moment. And of course, the right in this country so far don't seem to connect foreign policy and... displaced peoples. But anyway, I find it remarkable that you have the same American elites and administration give carte blanche to Israel to do this stuff. They know the refugees don't go to the US, they go to Europe. And then they say to the Europeans,

Europe's fallen. But the Europeans don't seem to have any sort of say in this. And the Europeans... get to agree with Europe has fallen with the Americans on the American and big tech platforms while buying American weapons to fight a war in Ukraine, which basically was catalyzed by the US State Department. Alongside Putin, it's an illegal war of aggression, but takes two to tango.

And it doesn't feel like a core anymore. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what? So I think that vassalization, would you agree at least that the vassalization of Europe has kind of intensified in the last 10 to 15 years? And if so, why?

Yeah, it's interesting. I do think probably there's some tendency in that direction. And the reason being, I think, is that as... uh, as kind of the imperial arrangement phrase with the, with the rise of, you know, some more sovereign seeking States in the global South China being one. Um, I think that the U S is going to be more likely like, like, like as this pinches.

the viability of capital accumulation in the core states, I think that it's going to make the U.S. more likely to start to cannibalize its own allies, right? And by the way, these were never really allies. These have always been like instruments of... of U.S. policy, effectively. Look, the future for Europe, I think, is fairly straightforward. What's actually in the interest of Europe, and especially Europe's working classes, is integration with the rest of Eurasia.

Like any five-year-old who looks at a map of the world can tell that Europe is not a real continent. It's a peninsula on Eurasia, right? And it's just crazy that the US has effectively organized the world in such a way that it's convinced European... peoples to believe that their direct neighbors are their worst enemies, China, Russia, et cetera, et cetera. This is crazy. And so clearly, like the path to a...

to a safe and prosperous Europe in the future is integration where the continent can handle its own crises collectively. And it's really, I think, fundamentally the U.S. and those within the European ruling classes who are aligned with U.S. imperial objectives. which is clear in the case of the current leader of the EU. They have no interest in that.

So I think that's a conversation that we need to be having, actually. Like, what does the future of Europe look like? And I think integration is key to that. Yeah, there's so many potential outcomes here. And I think of de Gaulle. De Gaulle is kind of like, you know, he's the last.

great European politician who believed in sovereignty, independent of the United States. I don't agree with Gaul on many things, obviously, but I'm just saying he believed in an independent France. And, you know, the CIA were kind of...

making inquiries to kill the dude, right? And they certainly didn't want, this is really interesting, in 1943, they didn't want him as the leader of a post-war France, the Brits did, because he was based in the UK and they thought they could get him to do what they want, silly them, because he was quite a junior.

person in the government before he fled, along with Jean Monnet, quite interestingly enough. And Pétain takes over in Vichy, France. So yeah, I think there are multiple outcomes for Europeans in the future. And I think... Right now, it seems to me the short-term answer is going to be, weirdly, ultranationalism combined with more deference to America. I really hope not. That seems to be the offer from the radical right, doesn't it? AFD, reform.

It seems to be, which is just crazy, especially to the extent that these people think that they're... I mean, the discourse you get from these parties is about sovereignty. But in fact, what they're going to deliver is not that at all. It's further vassalage and also misery for their working class. It's as simple as that. I think that the story of Greece and Italy...

And to some extent, Spain is actually really important here, right? In the 20th century, you had very popular socialist and communist movements in Greece and Italy. And of course, also in Spain. And they were poised to win elections at key moments. And the US intervenes to crush those movements.

They intervened to affect election outcomes, et cetera, et cetera, to ensure that socialists and communists never came to power in Southern Europe. In Spain, they did not come to the aid of... of the socialists and anarchists fighting against the Franco regime.

In fact, the U.S. supported the Franco regime. And U.S. presidents landed in Spain and did photo ops alongside Franco supporting his regime. It's absolutely crazy. I mean, this is a fascist regime that the U.S. openly supported in the 20th century. And so I think that it's crucial to understand that, like...

The U.S. does not have the interests of Europeans in mind, certainly not the interests of the European working classes. And I think that it's actually crucial that all of us understand that fact, right, and start to take steps accordingly to achieve not only... national sovereignty from US vassalage, but also popular sovereignty through socialist movements.

that can confront that kind of threat. I've loved this conversation on foreign policy and geopolitics, but now I'm going to bring the debate back to degrowth and growth. Okay. Because I agree with, by the way, your most recent book i agree with basically all of it jason um not even basically there's no caveats i agree with all of that but how would you respond to the question

or the proposition rather, that degrowth is bad branding. Because nobody likes to degrow, right? We like growth. We like children growing. We like businesses growing. We like families growing. We like personal growth. I'm actually not against that claim. I think it might be, in fact. But it was never really meant to be branding. It was meant to be an analytical term. I think it's very useful as an analytical term.

for scientists, for academics, and I think also within the climate movements, within the left, within socialist movements and so on. I think that is actually a really important term that we need to help us rethink what is the objective of the economy. And certain key things that we have to achieve, like degrowing, damaging and unnecessary capitalist industries. Right. That's actually something we have to do.

But I really don't think it ever was intended to be a public-facing term, certainly never one that a political movement should use at the podium, because obviously it's very prone to misunderstanding. and can even create antagonisms. Now, what's interesting is that the people who coined the term actually liked it for that reason.

That's an interesting history. They considered it what they call a missile word. And they liked it because, you know, if you say to somebody, you know, we need, you know, ecological sustainability or we need to green our economy. They're going to be like, yeah, I agree with that.

If you start talking about, we're going to have to scale down certain forms of production and particularly the consumption of the ruling class, let's say, then this will create a conflict, right? And so degrowth is actually... is useful to the extent that it creates antagonisms, you know, antagonisms that words like green economy don't. And this helps us have a conversation about what's going on and what's actually needed. So I think it can be useful in that way.

People's immediate reaction is, that sounds absolutely crazy. And then they start to think about it and they're like, well, that sounds fairly reasonable. So I think it can be useful as kind of a tool for... intellectual development, let's say. I mean, when I first heard it, I had a very negative reaction against it. In fact, I was like, this is crazy. In fact, it's very clear that...

Economies do need to grow all the time. And this is what I learned in my economics classes. And that's how you maintain a stable economy. And degrowth is just an affront to that assumption. And then it forces you to think, wait a second, do economies really need to grow all the time? Like should the U.S. economy keep increasing aggregate output, even though it has worse social outcomes?

than European economies with half the GDP per capita, right? This doesn't make any sense. And so I think it triggers a process of introspection. But I really don't think that anyone, again, needs to be using it at the podium.

It should be an analytical term, I think, primarily. And ultimately, also, here's the other key thing, is that people talk about there's a degrowth movement. And a degrowth agenda and all that, right? I just don't think that either of these things exist. I mean, obviously, the idea has become very popular in scientific circles and in climate circles. But there's no political movement around degrowth that could actually achieve power and implement policy.

And I think that suggesting that the existing ruling class would implement degrowth, in other words, scale down unnecessary production, increase necessary production, this is a fantasy. It's not going to happen, right? Because this is not... There are mainstream parties with a similar-ish platform like the Green Party in this country. I mean, they can end up in the next election with 15, 20 MPs. I mean, that's a substantial number of...

So it kind of does matter, no, in terms of the... Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, fair enough. But the Green Party, I wouldn't call it like a... It's not a...

mainstream capitalist party, right? It's actually an anti-capitalist party. Yeah, exactly. It's actually an anti-capitalist party. They would talk about degrowth and so on. So if the Green Party takes power, then we've effectively had a socialist revolution, isn't it? And this is the point I want to make, is that degrowth cannot, the things that degrowth calls for.

cannot happen within capitalism. It's antithetical to capitalism. And in fact, this is the reason why degrowth gets so much hate. It's interesting. I had a conversation with a leading figure of degrowth recently, and I was like, you know...

we actually should stop using the term because people hate it. And he was like, you have to understand, people don't hate it because it sounds negative. They hate it because they can see that it's anti-capitalist. They hate it because it's very apparent that this is against the interest of capital accumulation and furthermore requires

democratic control over production and planning, right? Because you're going to have to plan the downscaling of some forms of production and the upscaling of others. This cannot occur. under capitalism as we know it. And so that's why there's a backlash from the right. And so I think that given that fact, what we actually want to do is play into that terrain more directly. Let's rid ourselves of the confusion. This is really about

class struggle. This is really about who controls the means of production. The movement, actually, is socialism. We have to build a movement for socialism that has the possibility of taking power and removing overcoming capitalist control of production, asserting democratic control over our own productive capacities so that we can address our social and ecological crises. That's the movement. That's the objective. I think that degrowth is properly understood as...

a piece of socialist transformation that applies specifically to rich countries. And again, I think one of the major misunderstandings of degrowth, and this is another reason why it triggers so much anger, is that people immediately think,

Oh, this is about denying development to the global south. No, it is fundamentally the opposite of that. It is specifically targeted at those nations that dramatically overshoot their planetary boundaries and have to reduce material and energy use to achieve sustainability. That does not apply to countries in the imperial periphery, where we know that in most cases, they need to increase their use of energy and resources.

to build out the infrastructure necessary to ensure good lives for all, right? And that entails aggregate increasing production, in other words, growth. Of course, a socialist development project in the periphery... like in China now, should not target growth for its own sake, but should target the necessary forms of production for human well-being. And right now in most Global South countries, that would entail an aggregate increase in production.

So that's the key, I think. I think that, yeah, I think that socialism is the main objective here and should be our rallying crime. The thing you said about GDP not really reflecting how... successful a society is you know you keep on seeing these memes online about the euro pause from americans

And they'll say, Mississippi has a higher GDP. Oh, it's the only state with a lower GDP. This is a good one. Than France. And I go, have you been to France? Like, okay, France has problems like anywhere else. It has France. Forget Mississippi.

has a longer life expectancy than the United States, some of the longest lived people in the world. It has almost all of its electricity being generated by nuclear power. It has some of the best... food and produce in the world it's the world's fourth largest wheat producer it has some of the best public transport on earth it has

Gorgeous, glorious history. I mean, look at how quickly they rebuilt the Notre Dame Cathedral. I know with private capital, but it required, including private capital, but it required a level of state coordination that actually this country doesn't have. People don't know this.

The rebuilding of Notre Dame was overseen by a French general. The guy died just before it finished. But it's quite interesting where you need to do something at this national prestige project. They don't get some, like, business CEO. They get a general. And I think that says something quite interesting about the state. So yeah, I mean, France, Spain, go to these countries. These are some of the most successful countries on earth.

The idea that like some poor U.S. state, you go to a town or a city in Mississippi and then go to Orleans or go to Zaragoza or Valencia, tell me which one's a more successful society. Yeah, think about it. It's pretty obvious. I wanted to just... go back though to this point about um degrowth and and branding because i get i i sometimes will criticize the folk politics of degrowth to be clear not what you're talking about not this book because

reducing exchange value, maximizing use value is the classical socialist project, right? And I think degrowth is that, is a very clean analytical way of describing it. But there is... Maybe you disagree. There is a kind of folk politics in degrowth, and I've met these people, where they say, we need to degrow the economy, and that's why I don't hoover my house anymore. Now, when I say this on YouTube, people try and cancel me.

I've literally met people like this. I've stopped hoovering the house. We've stopped eating meat good. But then I find out actually they eat a ton of eggs and avocados and produce from elsewhere. So there's this kind of folk politics of degrowth, which actually, A, doesn't achieve what it sets out to do anyway. But B, means you regress on quite fundamental gains in the 20th century. Like, and again, I'm not joking, washing machines.

hoovering um even just using the bus right i would never you know get on something some people do say this i've not met Personally, the person that says, I've seen it, but I haven't met the people that won't use the Hoovers and the washing machines or will use them less. I'll give you a really classic example here. Dishwashers. Dishwashers, and I know there's a bunch of embodied carbon within the machine itself, but they use less water.

than when you wash with hand. They use less energy. And they obviously save time. So in terms of labor substitution, I think that's quite a smart device. In terms of inbuilt obsolescence, they should last longer, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that's quite a smart thing.

Totally. There is this folk politics where it's like, no, do it by hand. Primitivism. Do you meet those people? I do. I'm very strongly against it for lots of reasons. Let's get into this. I think it's empirically and also politically wrong.

I would say this is actually closer to, I mean, it's a folk politics of degrowth, that's true, but I would say it's basically a dominant position within what I would call kind of bourgeois green politics, right? This idea that... Ultimately, the problem is individual patterns of consumption. And so therefore, it's a politics of guilt, right? We should all feel guilty. We consume too much. We should therefore...

try to constrain their consumption, take shorter showers, stop eating meat, compost, and recycle and things like this, right? By the way, all of these things can actually be effective. These people are doing good things by their own standards, sure. But ultimately, this will not actually overcome the problems we face because it's not actually about consumption. Consumption is in fact downstream from the production system.

This is crucial to understand. And so what really matters here is what is being produced and under what conditions. Us taking shorter showers and composting and so on, right, does not, in fact, change the structure of production. And so ultimately, this is a completely failed political approach.

that can't achieve its objectives, but also furthermore, absolutely alienates the working classes, right? And so you have, you know, you have, and this is maybe not true of the UK Green Party, which I think is actually fairly socialist.

and has very good policy approaches for the most part. But if you look at like the German greens, right? So you have these like sort of middle upper class German green folks who go around talking about how we consume too much, blah, blah. You think that can connect?

with a German working class who are living hand-to-mouth in some cases, like barely making ends meet, being told that they consume too much is actually crazy, you know? And so I think that you need a much more structural analysis. And this is in fact what...

what degrowth provides when you dig behind the label, you know, and actually understand what the, what the academics are saying about, about this, um, which is that, for example, um, the UK, the, the, the U S for example, in particular has very high level of, um, of material use okay uh now even if you were to dig into

the class dimensions of this, you might find that the working classes also have high material use. Now, why is that? Is it because they're just like ramping consumers? No, it's because the structure of their provisioning systems is highly materially intensive. And so public transport is not provided. Everybody has to own a car. And they've got to drive that to get to work, right? The rental stock is massively substandard.

totally inefficient. They have inefficient appliances. All of this drives up their energy use, et cetera. And so their so-called energy footprints or the carbon footprint might actually be high, but through no fault of their own. It's due to the provisioning systems. of the economy, which are a result of having a capitalist economy, right? And so in a situation where you have, you know, socialist democratic control over production, you can very quickly ensure people's provisioning is improved.

Like mobility access can go up with public transit, et cetera, with a lot less energy materials. And that's what has to be achieved. And so the idea that this is about individual responsibility is completely misguided. And capital loves this idea. I mean, you can see like major fossil fuel firms invest in promoting this idea of the individual carbon footprints.

Didn't they came up with it, right? I think Shell came up with it. And so I think we have to get away from that kind of politics. This is the structural problem about the production system. Again, I've got to emphasize. The ecological crisis is 100% an effect of the production system. That is it. It's about who controls production and what we're producing and who benefits from it. Simple as that. And that's ultimately what we're going to have to tackle, I think.

So, yes, we have to get away from bourgeois green politics and move towards something like, you know, eco-socialist politics, where ecology is alongside human welfare as main objectives for the economy. So we've had an amazing conversation. about foreign policy, about the future of the economy, industrial policy, China, US empire. I'm going to finish with something which people probably don't really associate with eco-socialists, which is fiscal policy and the national debt.

Because, of course, if you're trying to move away from, and bear with me, this might sound quite strange. If you're trying to move away from growth, and I think we would still have some growth, right? I mean, you could probably say...

we probably would still have a national growth rate of 0.51% a year because of, you know, improvements in productivity. Actually, probably in the short term when you decarbonize, you probably would have a big bump of growth, but whatever. You're not measuring, you're not trying to measure that anyway.

you would have some growth, but the point is you wouldn't have much. Actually, what's interesting is I think lots of people out there today, on the right as well, if you said, look, if we solve these fundamentals, housing, transport... child poverty, your high street looks better, but our national growth rate is 0.8% per annum rather than 2%. They said, well, yeah, of course I take that. That's the battle we've got to win. But anyway, to go back to fiscal policy.

We can borrow with regards to our deficit because of inflation, because of growth, right? So first of all, a three plus percent deficit, regardless of what the European Central Bank says, isn't a big deal. If you have a 5% deficit, but you're growing at 2.5% and inflation is 3%, 4%, it doesn't matter. You're basically on an even keel. However, if what you're saying is we don't have much growth and we don't have much inflation.

A lot of inflation actually is coterminous with the kinds of growth we've seen over the last century because of monetary policy and whatnot. I know we're getting into some very strange weeds here, but I think this is a really interesting point. If we're not going to have growth... then presumably we can't really have big deficits anymore. So you could run a deficit of one, two, maybe 3%, but you couldn't do deficit financed, not that you'd want to, deficit financed growth because...

there wouldn't be a means of paying it. The whole point of using that model is that the economy gets bigger over time alongside inflation. So how does that work? It was just something when I was rereading your book this time, I didn't think about it the first time several years ago. I thought about it this time.

So Keynesians say, well, it's okay to borrow because the economy will get bigger. But if we don't want the GDP to get bigger, then presumably we can't borrow as much. Does that make you a fiscal hawk?

No, I'm definitely not. So let me explain, I guess, kind of how I see it. And I hope this doesn't get too technical for people, but I think it's useful. So the governments... issues currency, right? And whoever is basically issuing the currency can determine the direction of production because that's what buys labor and mobilizes.

factories and so on, right? So money in this sense is quite important. Now, under capitalism, what happens is that the government actually outsources that power to commercial banks. So it's the commercial banks that issue most of the currency. And they're the ones that therefore get to determine the direction of production. They invest again in what is profitable to capital, maybe not what's most important for humans. And so I think that the government can take that power back.

and bring money creation back under public control, can issue currency right now to do the necessary things we need to do. Build public transit, build out renewable energy capacity, rejuvenate our high streets. regenerate ecosystems regardless of their profitability. We can do this right now and we can do it with a public finance mechanism and the currency that the government issues. Now, of course, the government cannot issue endless amounts of currency.

Because what happens is that the more, the key limitation is inflation, right? Everybody will understand those facts. The more public finance goes into the economy and you do a bunch of public works, you're now competing. with capitalist producers over labor and materials and factories and so on, right? So this is going to drive inflation in the economy once the slack is taken up. How do you avoid that? You have to somehow reduce...

capitalist forms of production, unnecessary capitalist forms of production. Part of that can be done through taxation. You reduce excess demand in the economy. in places you don't want by taxing the rich, for example. Why should the rich be able to command our labor to get us to build their mansions and curate their lawns, et cetera, et cetera, right?

reduce their, like tax them, reduce their command over the domestic, over the national productive capacity, and therefore free up real resources that we can redirect towards the public projects that we need to be doing, right? That's one way to do it through taxation. The second way, and that would maintain a fiscal balance, right? The second way is actually through credit policy. Okay, so you can basically put rules on the commercial banks to limit their creation of private money.

and therefore their investments in capitalist forms of production. Let's say we want to scale down fossil fuels and SUVs. So we put rules on them to reduce the quantity of money creation that gets invested in these forms of production. That too liberates real resources.

that can be, again, redirected towards the public objectives we want to achieve. And this is what economists call a non-fiscal pay-for. And so you're cutting off, you're reducing the private commercial investment in the money supply. to reduce certain capitalist forms of production and therefore giving yourself the space to increase public production. This can be done very, very quickly. And this is the kind of thing, in fact, that China does. So this is a crucial strategy. Now...

What's actually going on here is that you're effectively through this process, shifting control over productive capacity away from the capitalist sector towards the democratically controlled public sector. And this is precisely why. In our existing economy, capitalist governments refuse to take this approach. Despite the fact that it would enable us to accelerate our progress on key social and ecological goals, they don't do this.

Precisely because they know that this is a transference of power and control from capital to the public. And that's unacceptable because that constrains possibilities for capital accumulation. Jason.

I think we'll leave it there. We'll leave it at that. That's a very complicated way to end things. No, I know, but people can read about these things. They can Google them. And the point you made about credit in our present system being... basically generated by private actors, private banks from nothing is a huge thing. Actually, many people are conning on to that right, left. They're aware of this bizarre way that we allocate resources.

in a way that wasn't the case 10, 20 years ago. For people that have been entranced by this conversation, I think, what a very intelligent, informed man. I've learned so much. Where can they follow you? Where can they read more by you and about you? So I have a couple of books, The Divide, A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, which covers, which discusses kind of the imperial dimensions of the world economy. And then Less Is More, which talks about degrowth.

I have a website called jasonhickle.org where I keep all of my published academic research available for free so people can find it there. There's also a website called globalinequality.org, which is co-produced with... my colleagues and students and postdocs that effectively allows us to see kind of handy data visualizations of how the imperialist capitalist economy works. So you can check it out.

hopefully useful to people. Let's see. But thanks very much, Aaron. I really enjoyed participating with Navara here. I've been a fan of the network for a while. Pleased with what you guys are doing. Thank you. It's been really fun. We'll get you back on soon. Sounds good. Support independent journalism and set up a regular donation to Navara Media from just £1 a month. Head to navara.media.org or face the consequences.