Billionaire Colonialism
BILLIONAIRE COLONIALISM: Jason Hickel on how colonialism never ended and drives today’s extreme inequality.
To coincide with the launch of Oxfam’s Davos 2025 report, Takers, not Makers, here is this interview acclaimed author, academic and activist Jason Hickel.
Find out how our world is still organised primarily to benefit a small group of white men in rich countries and what we can do to stop this.
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Great podcast. I have no argument with the views given.
However, whilst it pointed to the linkages between billionaires and the history of colonial inequality and capitalist extraction, the podcast didn’t offer any analysis of the position of the non-billionaires in the extractive North.
I heard hope for a working class movement to end the world’s oppression but no mention that there might be a north/south divide within that class.
I’m not wanting to encourage such divisions, but they do seem to be there. Up here in the North, we have a working class which has done rather well out of the exploitation of outsourced labour, from 17th century Virginia to 21st century Guanzhou. They/we like the affordable clothes and phones and cars and exotic foods.
How might we motivate ourselves to throw off our billionaire oppressors when we live on a very substantial platform of housing, education, health, transport, food, water, gas and electricity and have access to all sorts of cheap entertainments, and when we also all receive a relentless outpouring of billionaire-funded propaganda?
It makes me wonder whether Trump and Farage and the other alt right leaders of the North are not simply riding the wave of Northern resistance to the threat of a Southern blowback, in which class is not the issue. It’s geo-political.
There is of course a racial element but we see black Northerners siding with their white Northern comrades to pull up the drawbridges and keep the Southerners out. It’s almost endearingly unracist behaviour. And it’s occurring across all classes.
What can we do?
I thought about answering but it became a ramble.
Love one another?
Be yourself?
Follow Hasan-i Sabbah?
What do you think?
who ever said it did end, maybe people don’t get out much.