Category: ENGLISH

An elegant and data-driven and logic analyses of the myths of green capitalism. The mainstream assumption is that, because ecological costs are ‘external’ to the market, once we ‘internalize’ them, then these reflected costs will affect market forces, and then everything will be solved. Let’s just put a correct price on carbon emissions, and on ecological degradation, the argument goes, and then the market will take care of the rest (bit leap of faith when humanity’s future is on the line). Starting from the fact that the ‘market’ cannot disentangle where emissions are coming from (is ethical and/or desirable to compare emissions emitted from building railroads or hospitals in Uganda or in rural Mexico to emissions from private jets, SUVs, or yachts?). Following to how the biggest asset managers in…

Although I went through a panic attack while reading some of the predictions linked to climate change in this book, I highly recommend it. Few books have made me question many dogmas – like economic growth and G.D.P, like less is more. Always with strong data to support his statements, and with international social justice at the center of his arguments, Jason Hickel describes how capitalism was created, or rather, forced upon people, by kicking people out from their land and the from their commons they had had and managed well for centuries (the enclosure movement), to force them into the workforce and to create scarcity. He also makes abundantly clear how capitalism cannot solve the climate catastrophe, and how, as long as we pursue unlimited economic growth on every…

I used to believe I understood how the world works. We vote, we can demand action from those in power. We can complain about what they do – or fail to do. No idea did I have of the international legal structures built exclusively to prevent autonomy and governance from countries. Jason Hickel devotes a chapter to this topic in the Divide: this book is entirely on it, with research carried out in 25 countries. The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes from The World Bank (a very secretly system) is an international legal arrangement that allows corporations to sue governments for anything that meses, actually or potentially, with their gains, from laws protecting workers to those limiting environmental impacts. This system completely cripples what governments can do. It…

Perhaps two extracts can exemplify how powerful this writing is: “The fact is that the so-called European civilization – “Western” civilization – as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem”. “What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not for the crime in itself, for the crime against the man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India and the “niggers” of Africa.”

Poor countries are chasing behind rich ones, and poor people are just steps behind, each on independent roads, right? Jason Hickel proves how wrong and misleading this narrative is. From the history and consequences of colonialism to the military interventions throughout multiple poor countries, to the financial world structures built to prevent the autonomy and ‘development’ of the Global South, including the immoral debts that slave poor nations, the world is rigged and keeps poor countries poor, which also maintains access to cheap labor and to natural resources to the Global North. Jason draws parallels between Latin America, Africa, and Asia, with heartbreaking anecdotes and quotes from all over the world. One of the most emblematic figures from this book is that for every dollar that enters the ‘Global Sough’…