"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism