Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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capitalism cannot function for long under conditions of global justice. Fair wages and decolonization are compatible with a functioning economy, but they are not compatible with a functioning capitalist economy, because they limit the possibility of capital accumulation.
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If you place too much pressure on your domestic resource base or your domestic working class, sooner or later you are likely to face a revolution. To avoid such an outcome, capitalism always requires an “outside,” external to itself, where it can cheapen labor and nature with impunity and appropriate them on a vast scale; an outside where it can “externalize” social and ecological damages, where rebellions can be contained, and where it does not have to negotiate with local grievances or demands
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capitalism, “growth” is not about increasing production in order to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. To keep such a system going requires several interventions. First, you have to cheapen the prices of inputs (labor, land, materials, energy, suppliers, etc.) as much as possible, and maintain those prices at a low level. Second, you have to ensure a constantly increasing supply of those cheap inputs. And third, you need to establish control over captive markets that will absorb your output.
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growth in the “core” of the world economy (Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) has always depended on the sabotage of labor and resources in the “periphery”. Consider the silver plundered from the Andes, the sugar and cotton extracted from land appropriated from Indigenous Americans, the grain, rubber, gold and countless other resources appropriated from Asia and Africa, and the mass enslavement and indenture of African and Indigenous people
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As the Indian economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik put it, capitalist growth requires an imperial arrangement—not as a side gig but as a structurally necessary feature.
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To deal with the crisis of the 1970s, capital needed a way to restore the imperial arrangement, to once again depress Southern prices and regain access to Southern markets. To achieve this, the core states intervened to depose progressive leaders in the global South—including, most prominently, Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, and Allende in Chile—replacing them with regimes more amenable to Northern economic interests. But the final blow was delivered by the World Bank and the IMF, which during the 1980s and 1990s imposed neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) across the region. This move shifted control over economic policy from the national parliaments of the South to technocrats in Washington and bankers in New York and London, ending the brief era of economic sovereignty. SAPs dismantled protections on labor and the environment, privatized public goods and cut public spending, reversing the reforms of the anti-colonial movement in one fell swoop.