Book Review, Jason Hickel: The Divide

I have belatedly got round to reading Jason Hickel’s The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.

Hickel is a latter day world-systems theorist, viewing the globe as consisting in a singular economy where the enrichment of the few – beginning with colonialism, and continuing through the twentieth century into the neoliberal era in particular – necessarily deprives the many.

The book is particularly perceptive in disentangling the real picture on world poverty from that promoted by a range of neoliberal institutions from the 1990s-2000s onwards.

For instance, in fashioning the ‘Millennium Development Campaign’, the World Bank determined to move its baseline year for measuring the number of people surpassing the $1 per day poverty metric – a dubious figure in itself – from 1980 to 1990.1 This allowed it to claim China’s gains against poverty as an achievement of the global, capitalist economy – not as an achievement of one region to wrest itself from its state of erstwhile subjection.

What these dubious measures really do is conceal the unsustainable and putrid core of a set of capitalist social relations that, unrestrained by any vigorous class politics or defence of the welfare state, ride roughshod over the lives and livelihoods of the majority of the world’s populations and ecologies to drive extraction.

In fact, this is how capitalism began. A narrow clutch of west European nations forcibly combined land, labour, and resources into an international system of trade and production that ravaged previously prosperous economies in China and India among other locations to concentrate wealth in one region.

One of the delusions most convenient to capitalism is that the world has simply always been unequal, and most of it was dirt poor until recently. In fact, as Hickel indicates, forager-farmer communities in the Middle Ages had life expectancies around 50% longer than early states including European but also Aztec, Inca, and Mayan examples.2 Prosperity and longevity are not the products of ‘civilisation’ on the Western or capitalist model at all.

What capitalism actually comprises is a system of extraction founded on the iniquities of colonialism which has now – under the ideological cloth of liberalism – recast itself as a liberatory force, and the sole route to wealth and success. Really, it deprives some in order to enrich others. From 1872 to 1921, the average life expectancy of Indians fell by 20% - described by Hickel as the subcontinent being ‘effectively de-developed’ – while its resources were tapped by a growing West.3

Such dynamics fundamentally shape the world we live in one hundred years later. Despite Keynesian efforts in the ‘First’ World, and anti-imperialist efforts in the ‘Third’ World, to redistribute wealth and progressively remove populations from poverty, rich men and multinational companies have reestablished dominion today. The latter simply siphon off wealth they have accumulated in poor countries which – rightly redistributed – would substantially lift those regions out of poverty, something they were disabled from doing for several decades until a neoliberal takeover of world economic institutions in the 1980s let them rewrite the rules.

To be sure, there was no conspiracy theory involved in this takeover. As George Monbiot has shown, wealthy men liked the economic theories that Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek among others began disseminating from the mid-twentieth century and pumped money into think tanks spreading the reach of these theories.4 Money talks, and today we have theories about economic growth springing from the unfettered riches and accumulation of shareholders, CEOs, and the very same men who own all the major newspapers and media organs taken for granted. Hmm!

Hickel shows that the absolute number of people in poverty has increased since 1980. This was shortly after the ‘developed’ world succeeded in changing the rules of institutions like the World Bank to force ‘Third’ World countries to sign up to structural adjustment programs that heavily indebted them while sending their wealth elsewhere.

The value of world-systems theory in itself is that it insists that the global capitalist economy is integrated and extracting resources, or dominating labour, in one region deprives that area to enrich another. Therefore poverty can only be substantially reduced by protectionism – which is how every country that industrialised in the modern age did so. China made vast gains against poverty by vigorous state action to protect and develop its own industries – even if it then sold commodities abroad – rather than by opening its borders to vastly wealthier persons from elsewhere to enter the country and steal resources while drugging up its populations, as happened during the ‘Opium Wars’ of the nineteenth century.

Hickel’s wider point with this book, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that trying to relentlessly tap ecological resources in order to produce commodities and achieve endless economic growth is a fool’s errand. According to the Millennium Development Campaign and mainstream economics, countries must achieve arbitrary levels of GDP growth on a continuous basis to begin lifting their own populations out of the abyss.

Not only does this ignore systemic exploitation between regions, as explored above. It also ignores that there are limits to planetary resources and to the amount of wealth that can be generated from them – including from people. We are committed to an economic model which proposes that all countries and continents can grow ceaselessly without any immiseration for people or planet. This is palpably absurd. Any concept of distribution, never mind redistribution, is absent.

What is really needed to reduce poverty while acknowledging the reality of climate change is two things: a different world economy; and a different economic logic. Taking the latter first, Hickel’s own preference is ‘degrowth’; the expansion of certain sectors of the economy alongside the reduction of others, and the cutting of excess consumption in wealthier global regions. This would require surrendering the all-consuming focus on GDP growth and focussing on other metrics such as wellbeing and biodiversity.

If we are to take the emergence of neoliberalism as described above as the example, then this shift in economic logic would come first, with the changed world economy coming second. Hickel is no unreconstructed Marxist ideologue theorising about how revolution will pre-empt any systemic change. There is not enough time for this kind of theorising; basic, albeit challenging, empirical investigations of the kind that Hickel has conducted are convincing enough to demonstrate the path forward without any grand theory of history to accompany them.

Even so, as Hickel mentions, capitalism does have certain ‘iron laws’. One is that capitalism – a system of uncontrolled accumulation and growth – can only persist where capital is funnelled into profitable investments. If not, crises of over-accumulation occur whereby capital progressively loses its value prompting economic cataclysms. Remember 2008? Excess capital flooded the financial sector due to fewer and fewer avenues for ‘real economy’ investment such as manufacturing or infrastructure, inflating asset bubbles and causing the crash.

Hickel, and other world-systems theorists such as Jason Moore, emphasise how capitalism plumbs one ‘frontier’ after another, extracting all it can and leaving a barren wasteland in its wake before identifying new productive avenues.5 Where these dry up, it crashes, and the world’s ecologies – far from being infinitely replicable – are finite. If we cannot work up the vision needed then these kinds of crises will recur. Future posts will explore these themes further.

1 Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 42. 

2  Hickel, The Divide, 66. 

3  Ibid., 93. 

4  George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2024). 

5   Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 

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