Capitalism cannot allow anyone to be free

This is a six-minute video that presents its thesis at hyper-speed but really well. The thesis is in the title: Palestine must continue to be a football in order for capitalism—and empire—to convince itself that it is still in charge.

Jason Hickel: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism by Transnational Institute (YouTube)

I’ve cleaned up a large part of the transcript below.

“What explains this incredible paradox? It’s ultimately our system of production, the social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of production. Capitalism, where our productive capacities—our incredible productive capacities—are organized overwhelmingly around what is most profitable to capital, and what can most facilitate accumulation in the core rather than what is obviously necessary to meet human needs and achieve our ecological objectives.

“And, so, we’re in this wild place, we’re just like, ‘oh, solving poverty is just going to take generations,’ right? If we’re lucky, we’ll get people above $1.90 a day by the end of the century, right? The climate crisis? Who can figure out how how to solve this? It seems intractable. None of this is true. It’s lies. These are problems that can be very easily solved and very quickly.

“The problem is, that we don’t have control over our own productive capacities, because we don’t have an economic democracy, right? Some of us live in political democracies, where, from time to time, we get to elect government officials but, when it comes to the economic system, not even the pretense of democracy is allowed to exist. And that is ultimately the contradiction we face.”

“I think this is a crisis that, at its root, is about capitalism, and can only be resolved by overcoming that fact. And the antidote to capitalism is economic democracy, that we should have collective democratic control over what we are producing, what the goals of our production are, who benefits from our production, and so on. And, when we do, we can solve these problems quickly, right? We know exactly what to do. The problem is we don’t have the power.”

“I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that a struggle for economic liberation in the south is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist world economy, because accumulation in the core depends utterly on the cheapening of labor and resources in the global south. It depends utterly on that, and has for the past 500 years. And, so, any attempt by liberation struggles in the periphery to achieve economic independence, to use their own resources for their own development, for their own ecological transition, for their own human needs, is destabilizing for capital in the core—and capital reacts with the most extraordinary violent backlashes.”