Foreword to The Exterminating Empire

In this stirring foreword to Chris Kaspar de Ploeg's The Exterminating Empire (Monthly Review Press, 2026), Jason Hickel decries a world in which cruelty, genocide, and rapacious capitalism have become de rigueur, seemingly with no consequences for the Western elites perpetuating these atrocities in the Global South. "The narrative of 'double standards,'" Hickel writes, "presupposes that they have at least some shred of morality. But they do not. For them there is but one standard: the law of capital."