How the world works.

Ted Trainer

Far too little attention is given to the imperial nature of the global socioeconomic system, which is the basic cause of most of the world’s problems. Jason Hickle’s recent article provides a powerful summary of the situation, studiously ignored by the mainstream.

Hickle simply states what has been documented for decades by a vast literature. The elite in control of the global political and economic systems work to maintain an empire which enables the massive looting that Hickle estimates transfers wealth worth a net $2.5 trillion per annum from poor to rich countries, and which also increasingly impoverishes people in the richest countries. This requires constant readiness to intervene economically and militarily to put down interference threatening the system. The ultimate threat is that subordinate states might attempt to break away from the conventional development ideology and pursue a model which allows them to devote their resources to their own benefit, as distinct from gearing them to the export of their resources to the rich countries, servicing unrepayable levels of debt to rich world banks, and providing lucrative investment opportunities for foreign corporations. They are trapped primarily by debt in a situation where they have no capacity to break out and pursue any other path. As Hickle says, “…the core states must find ways to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Sovereign development means Southerners begin to escape their subordination, produce more for themselves, increase their wages, and consume their own output.”

Hickle discusses Israel’s role in all this.

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

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

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

The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but the US and its main allies reject this. Why? Because Palestinian liberation would remove a key US proxy, and would open the way to liberation movements elsewhere in the region

Hickel points to the massive hypocrisy of rich world elites and their lackeys.

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

So the Penny Wongs of the world prattle on about preserving “the rules based order”, with no reference to the fact that the rich set the rules which suit themselves,  such as the market and investors shall determine who gets wealth and what is developed, as distinct from making sure human and ecological needs determine what’s done.

But you would be very wise not to speak up about the empire. You are now likely to end up in Guantanamo on the correct charge that you are threatening national security. More importantly, if they took any notice of you and ceased the imperial looting you would lose your comfortable, affluent, resource-squandering way of life. No more cheap Tantalum from the Congo for your mobile phone or chocolate harvested by West African children.

Hickel is drawing attention to only one element within the rapidly worsening global “poly crisis” that has been caused by the determination to live with far more affluent lifestyles and systems than are remotely possible to sustain or to spread to all people. The party is over. A sustainable and just world cannot be conceived other than in terms of a huge degrowth transition down to far simple lifestyles and systems. This can only be done via transition to some kind of simpler way, involving mostly small highly self-sufficient and self-governing cooperative settlements. (See TSW The Alternative, and the Pigface Point video.) We are heading for, to put it mildly, “the great simplification”. Capitalism is now into it’s self-destructive end game, and we are incapable of doing anything about it. Try telling Albanese and Chalmers that we need to cut the GDP by 70%.

The only hope is that as governments becoming increasingly unable to deal with worsening problems enough people will realise that they must get together locally to provide as well as they can for themselves. ( See TSW Transition theory.) This is happening in initiatives such as the ecovillage, transition towns, degrowth, and localism movements, especially in the poorest countries. The chances that these will gain sufficient momentum to be capable of taking us down a sustainable and just alternative path when the dust clears are not good, but if you want to contribute to a satisfactory post-imperial world these are the campaigns to put scarce energy into.