From Cochabamba to a People's Green New Deal with Max Ajl

Speaker 1: ¶¶

Speaker 2: Welcome to another episode of Cosmopod, and today we have an interview with author Max Heil on his new book on the People's Green New Deal, and basically a theoretical intervention into the question of what the Green New Deal should look like, a question that's seen a lot of attention recently with all, you know... Basically, climate, COVID, and also in the economic context, because some people see a Green New Deal as a hope for jobs to get out of this economic crisis.

Max Ajl: My name is Max Ayo, and I am a postdoctoral fellow at Wageningen University and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. and I am a long-time pro-Palestine and anti-imperialist activist. I've spent most of the period over the last 12 years or so in various countries of the Arab region, especially Tunisia, and most of my work centers around anti-imperialist sovereign development.

Speaker 2: Right. And before you even go into people's Green New Deal book, we read your piece on the Arab region. And we thought it was very interesting, right, how you center the agrarian question and how you say there's four different kinds of agrarian question in your opinion, sorry, or five different kinds. I wanted to know if you could elaborate what drew you to this? What is an Arab agrarian question in your opinion? And why is it, you know... Important for understanding the world, right? This is a starting point for theory rather than other starting points that people take.

Max Ajl: Absolutely. To start off, the inquiry into the Arab region, including on the left or progressive sectors, remains mired in all sorts of idealisms and, in fact, mainstream propaganda, which acts as a smokescreen to prevent us from apprehending what social struggle is today. what anti-systemic struggle is and how anti-systemic struggle can move towards further horizons in the region. So all of this is just totally blockaded for a huge variety of reasons, not least that the anti-systemic thought or the radical thought of the Arab region is very poorly known. within the contemporary Western progressive communist left. So it's an intervention in that and its ramifications in critical agrarian studies, as the two are very much related. And it was also about grounding the discussion of the role of land agriculture nation in a possible Arab sovereign development effort and grounding that also in the needs of agriculture and bridging that debate with ongoing debates in critical agrarian studies and also more canonical debates within within critical agrarian studies, Marxist political economy, the agrarian question, and so forth. So the primary intervention departs from, in fact, the clear empirical phenomenon that the Arab region is... both appears to be kind of suffused with violence and the ideology of that violence is, of course, a subject of what passes again for debate, right? And there are smokescreen explanations, which are non-explanations about the ideology of that violence as well as serious explanations like, Ali Qadri's observation that the region is primarily articulated into the world system by means of oil, finance, and war, and that there are synergistic interactions between these three. And although one would think that that kind of reprises the erasure of the agrarian aspects of national development. In fact, what I was seeking to do is to actually see how it relates to a specific agrarian question, which we seldom, which at least canonical, especially Western agrarian studies don't pay all that much attention to, which is the agrarian question of national liberation, right? And this is really departing From Amilcar Cabral, who's been a very formative thinker for me, and also the work of the Agrarian South Project, Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros, Pravin Jha, and of course the other people, and their specific work on the agrarian question, but also the broader people associated with that, like Lynn Osom and Archana Prasad and so forth. And what they really brought to the table and make very clear is that national liberation and the national question actually help us to gain a better coherence on our understanding of the other agrarian questions, the agrarian question of how to mobilize politically or how people should organize and relate to the peasantry. That is something whose parameters are set and that is inflected by, uh, by the national question and whether or not states are sovereign and so forth. And it's the same for this question of mobilization of surplus for national development and national industrialization efforts. The classic Piotr Brzezinski agrarian question is a question that can only be rendered comprehensible once we understand the anterior or primary or foundational agrarian question of national liberation. And this also helps us reground the question of Palestine, which is often very often rendered in idealist or tautological terms as this kind of self-creating racist entity. And of course, it is a racist social process going on. This is very clear. But the Palestinian national liberation question is both a question of related to the national question as it relates to land, as it relates to who has sovereign control over this very important productive resource, which is why the question of land and in the phrase of Palestinian revolutionaries, liberation and return have been the eternal kind of catch call of of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. And furthermore, that this question of Palestinian control over land is kind of in a constant dynamic interaction, as well as being the compass for the broader Arab nationalist revolutionary movement. So it's really tied into a broader Arab national question, which again is about control over not just land, but as Cabral put it, control over the historical and direction of the productive forces, which of course is fundamentally land, but it's also other things too, but it's how, in what direction will those forces be developed? How will they be deployed? Who has control over how will they deployed? And so for Cabral, and this is really why I think there's more or less a suppression of discussion of Cabral on the Western left, because he doesn't lend himself to kind of obscurantist interpretations such as Fanon was also very clear. In fact, Fanon was like, what do peasants want? Peasants want the land. But this is easily suppressed because Fanon also had his other inclinations, whereas Cabral is dangerously clear, which is why he was murdered at such a young age. And what he was making clear is that national liberation was really would be achieved through an immediate transition to socialist planning at the culmination of the national independence struggle. It was not about and it was not about a bourgeois planning effort. Right. So all of this, I kind of wanted to bring to the table and assess how we could think about the Arab movement. liberation struggle, as it is currently in front of us today, and ground it so that we don't have to get caught up on these horrible evasions like terrorism, Islam, authoritarianism, patrimonialism, rentier states, and so forth, that really prevent us from even understanding in the least what's going on in the Arab region.

Speaker 2: Right. And you mentioned the work of Paris, Jerusalem, and Samoa, which some of that's also read, and we could really see it shine a New Deal. So maybe you can pivot that to say, what was your inspiration for writing this book? Because you have been very clear which traditions you are drawing on, like Amilcar Cabral, Sam Moyo, Parisieros, who are very often ignored. And things like the struggle in Zimbabwe is, you rightly say, demonized. I hope we can get Parisieros someday on this podcast to talk about it. So maybe you can elaborate on why, you know, why your book on the Green New Deal? when there's already like four or five books on this?

Max Ajl: Part of the reason this book is a physical artifact that may or may not be in front of you, maybe just be a printed out PDF or something, is because I was not able to publish critiques of the Ocasio-Cortez Green Dune deal. I attempted to publish several critiques, whether in the form of commentary appended to essays or whether freestanding to book reviews or freestanding essays. I actually encountered a bit of intellectual blockade when it came to getting these views out for obvious reasons, right? Fundamentally linked to opportunism and people thinking that, okay, Ocasio-Cortez, she's a very dynamic, popular figure. We wouldn't want to be seen as attacking her. Right. And people I mean, there were you know, there were some legitimate reasons that some of my work couldn't get published. You know, I perhaps push it out too fast. But there was clear that including amongst several journals where it might be a surprise to hear that this is the case. It was clear that this line of inquiry and critique was being blockaded. And I really thought that this was important to push this forward. And so I happened to have the time and had kind of some basic ideas that I don't think are so novel, but about how sovereign worldwide developmental efforts should look like. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to write a book about it. So it was more about that. It was not Initially, the impetus was not I need to write a book. It was that I need to write an article. And then since I wasn't allowed to write an article, I wrote a book instead briefly. But it's also very clear that the uniformly all the literature on the Green New Deal totally ignores agriculture. to my knowledge. There's one book that came out, I think, a couple months ago that does deal with agriculture and Stan Cox, which came out, a wonderful book, which came out while I was finalizing this book, also deals a bit with agriculture, although it's not really his focus, which is a bit odd because actually he knows a lot more about agriculture than I do. He's a professional sorghum breeder at the Land Institute. which is a beautiful institute that anyone interested in agriculture in the United States and Canada should really know about because what they're doing is breeding, trying to get inside the cycle and breed perennial grains. But this to the side, I thought it's fundamental because One of the, the Ukrainian question is so essential for third world development. And as the third world, if it is to regain sovereign control over its own agricultural systems and direct them towards popular needs, this will really impel a reconstruction of the agrarian system in the first world. There's a lot of things we are used to getting in the first world from the third world. There are a lot of ways in which we are used to dumping first world crops on the third world. And this is sidestepping that the You know, it's usually not phrased this way, but the first world, and here I speak primarily of the U.S., which I know best, has kind of hidden agrarian question on multiple levels. And I think it's actually, it's quite urgent. The degree of ecological degradation on U.S. farmlands is... immense. It's a completely vulnerable agrarian system, as we've seen with both in the sense that it can incubate viruses very, very easily. But it's also very, very vulnerable to blight because it's a monoculture. And it can be wiped out practically in the blink of an eye. So it's an extremely vulnerable agrarian system, even from a very narrow anthropocentric perspective. From a kind of broader perspective, anthropocentric perspective, because we don't have, as humans, we don't have non-anthropocentric perspectives, in my opinion. It's not doing a good job of taking care of the environment. It causes huge damages to the soil. completely shatters biodiversity. There's an insect holocaust, which we read about all the time and we see related to bee die-offs and so forth, which kind of get media attention because bees are lovely, aesthetically pleasing creatures, but it's actually related to a broader, massive deaths of insects that's starting to be reported widely. And it's, you know, it's kind of what actually what Rachel Carson warned us about with the silent spring is really happening. And I think people can actually see it in front of us. You know, any young person, relatively, but not too young person would have grown up with fireflies and doesn't see them anymore. to the degree we used to. And this is, it's kind of this mounting catastrophe. You know, the U.S. core is so wealthy, it doesn't really have to deal with it at the present moment. But that doesn't mean that these mechanisms won't reach tipping points that will just completely devastate what's left of the first world ecology. I mean, and that would be in general to the degree possible, the contradictions would be exported to the third world. But but at the same time, you know, I think that the agrarian question is a kind of hidden or it's not hidden. Let us say concealed or buried realm of struggle on multiple fronts that I think are so crucial for thinking about what kind of country this should be, which. people don't necessarily always think about. But there's lots of things that are deeply related to the agrarian question that are kind of at the spear's point of anti-systemic struggles in the core. I mean, the indigenous... communities in the united states what they are fighting for is national liberation not all of them but the most uh the most politically radical ones are fighting for national liberation right and this is uh the cabral agrarian question of national liberation You know, the contours of that is complicated, to be sure. But that is what that struggle is. And if people, and I think understandably, a lot of people are interested in supporting that struggle and understanding kind of what the foundation of the United States was based on. But if you want to understand it, that is, I think, one way of understanding it. And even if it doesn't, it isn't always put in, framed in that specific way, and it doesn't have to be framed in that specific way, but it does allow us to understand it and connect it to other agrarian questions. And if you look at the historic black struggle in the United States, The most or certainly one of the most violently suppressed and aggressed sectors of black struggle in the United States has been radical black nationalism, which has had a very clear agrarian. Right. And you Malcolm X was very clear that the land and national liberation was absolutely central. And this is also the thesis of the Black Belt. Whether one supports it or not, I mean, I support it, but whether one supports it or not, these have absolutely been central ways, central theories, really, that have animated the Black struggle, which I think more and more people in the United States understand is absolutely central to any sort of reconstruction of the United States as a decent society in supporting the Black struggle in its radical formulation, right? And there's a lot going on in the countryside too that is unfortunately often captured by but that could be turned. And I don't want to be interpreted as talking about the white working class and like how we should be pandering to them and so forth. I'm kind of making a more, just a broader statement that is just simply that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in terms of what is the regenerative agriculture movement. I mean, like I said, a lot of it is racist, but there is a lot of interest in sustainable agriculture amongst younger people. and in terms of how the US production system could be reconfigured in fully sustainable ways. And so I think it's natural that this is something radicals should be interested in as well, not least because if one talks to these people or even reads their literature, a lot of them are people who are doing this work are more and more open to very radical opinion. And they're reading up on it themselves. And anyone who's doing organizing work in the Midwest or anywhere that's close to a farm, farm areas, would very quickly find that these are important ways of production that need to be engaged with. They can't be ignored. I mean, and this is, of course, this is furthermore bracketing. If things really heat up in the U.S., it will be a good thing for people to have farms. I mean, that's how the black civil rights movement was able to survive, right? People had farms and were also capable of defending them. And that's where organizing happened. And so I think it's very useful to have these types of, to have knowledge about how to grow and produce food. I mean, you never know what's gonna come our way.

Speaker 2: Right. And, you know, these things are a way that we can maybe talk to people who were broadly on the left, but maybe not. You know, they see the Green New Deal or because I know many eco-socialist groups around the country that are just, you know, they decided the best thing to do now is to push for the PRO Act because that can give us some sort of Green New Deal down the line. Like, well, there's other things you can do, right? And it seems that articulating the Black liberation struggle, Indigenous liberation struggle, gives us a way to go from what's on the table right now from the capitalists to something that looks much more like the People's Green New Deal you're proposing.

Max Ajl: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It broadens things out. It's a way of identifying important connections between various struggles, various overlaps. It's not a political theory of change, really. It's meant to be helpful towards people who more have more of that bent and are trying to articulate political theories of change. But it's really just putting forward the centrality of some of these demands, which includes an agrarian reform in the United States. Right. I mean, I think I don't think anyone on the left, except for Aaron Bastani, who's not really on the left. You know, he's a provocateur who thought capitalism was progressive till 1980. Right. I don't think anyone is not appalled by the fact that Bill Gates is now the, one of the major owners of farmland in the United States. Right. Like what is Bill Gates planning to do with that farmland? Bill Gates is also a major investor in, uh, synthetic meat, right. Along with Bill Gates, of course, through the Bill and Melinda Gates, uh, foundation from hell. They're also major investors, for example, in third world birth control with a heavy Malthusian edge. I mean, the scope of their project is quite massive, right? And they are paying a lot more attention to agriculture than, unfortunately, a lot of the Marxist left. So this kind of disarms us to understand what is the agenda of the ruling class and how can we orient to have our own agenda in terms of something very basic, the land. I mean, we can't just be holed up in cities and have communist factories in the cities. It's like Maoism in reverse, right? That's not a very good idea. And let Bill Gates hold all the farmland. Like, this is not a good idea.

Speaker 2: So going back maybe a few steps, let's talk a bit about the Cochabamba Declaration, right? Because many people, you know, you know Evo Morales, but they might not know that Evo Morales' rise to prominence was through basically both a fight against water privatization, again, you know, fight for natural resources, and then the Cochabamba's People's Agreement, right? And that you mentioned that it should be reprinted and read, because that is a very good start for radical politics on the environment. Can you maybe talk a bit about this and, you know, how the Green New Deal today, all water sat down?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So this is a fundamental document. And if I could briefly contextualize its importance and how it allows us to reframe our understandings of third world environmentalism, it should be stated that Not bizarrely, because from the perspective of kind of a racist Western left, it's quite understandable why there's an urgent need to demonize someone like Evo Morales, right? But still somewhat bizarrely, Evo Morales and the Bolivian government have been successfully painted by large sectors of kind of mercenary groups. literary mercenaries of the Western left is actually harmful to the environment. And this is crazy, right? This is the most kind of empiricist, methodologically nationalist socialism in one country, framing of the issue that is not paying any attention to the actual political ecology of things of environmental crisis and with the kind of the most anti-Marxist really understandings of mineral extraction and so forth. And this isn't just related to this question of, you know, the incubation of a mass and its interaction with the mass movements fighting against the privatization of in Cochabamba. But this is also that the class wars fought, of course, on an international, not just a local stage, but also an international stage. And losses and gains are also registered in international countries. which is why the U.S. fights very hard in the U.N. system and in terms of international agreements, international treaties, as to what it does and does not sign. It doesn't take that as an unimportant battlefield. It takes that as a very important battlefield. And on that battlefield, Evo Morales, along with Hugo Chavez, and for that matter, the Sudanese government at that time, were the, and of course, Cuba, were the primary defenders of the third world environments and rights development when they blockaded the Copenhagen Agreements in 2009 and said, this is a capitalist agreement that goes against the interests of Mother Earth and goes against the interests of the people of the third world. And we need our own people's agreement that can actually accurately reflect the interests of the peoples of the third world so this is the context for the 2010 coachabamba meetings and all the accompanying documents and these documents are very radical and it's not just the the main document which is a beautiful document with a very extensive set of demands but also the technical the the annexes and the the documents from each of the working groups and i There's many. I'm blanking precisely on the exact number. These are very interesting and very clear technical documents that, for me at least, reminded me of these kind of classic, what is now called third worldist documents from the 70s. terms of their clarity in terms of their vision i mean they reminded me of stuff from the uh african asian uh people solidarity organization the new international economic order these very uh detailed uh precise ambitious visionary uh utopian demands coming from the third world that were of course viciously fought by the united states right i mean and israel i mean israel assassinated one of the key members for that matter of the uh the African Asian People's Solidarity Organization and the United States did everything it could to defeat any sort of implementation of the new international economic order, which of course also founded on internal contradictions to be sure, but also the external aggression also against the entire Third World Project was part and parcel of that. So anyway, what I mean to say is that these documents are really beautiful, fundamental, foundational documents. And it's not just that they should be read for the purpose of internal pedagogy and building up domestic demands, but it's also useful to use them as a kind of prism to understand the political logic of their suppression in contemporary climate discourse, which is also what I tried to do in my book, It wasn't my primary goal. So just to say what is the primary demand that emerges from those documents is the demand for climate. And this was a demand that in turn Bolivia submitted actually to the UNFCC. Its submission was, I believe, not accepted. But the demand was basically for 6% of northern Bolivia. GDP to flow north-south every year for an undetermined number of years. And the number on that is something like 1.3 trillion from the United States, 3.2 trillion taking the OECD or Northern GDP. That would be the amount of yearly capital grants flowing from North to South to allow the South space to develop and also allow access to the use values produced by humanity, right? And this was really conceived by the South as reparations for the adaptation debt, for the mitigation debt, for the climate debt, as part of the broader ecological debt, which in fact they conceive as a broader issue than merely the climate. which is very important, right? And that the process of worldwide environmentally uneven exchange has not just been about the climate, it's also been about broader ecological depredations inflicted from the North onto the South very broadly. over the course of a worldwide uneven accumulation. And all of that, of course, is part and parcel of the broader colonial debt and the demands emanating from the South for recognition and actual repayment of this kind of the atrocity atrocities occurred during the looting process of colonialism right and these types of demands right reparations uh climate debt first of all of course these are uniformly ridiculed uh by a lot of the western left right you can see like when people aren't even willing to discuss the fact that there are still radical black organizations in the u.s that are asking for reparations for slavery right and they're like well that's just going to the black bourgeoisie it's like uh okay this is not really you know you can suppress the fact that these demands have a national edge, and that's the historical form that they have appeared in us in front of history, like boo-hoo, right? Like this is the form of the struggle, and these are legitimate demands, and so we should meet that. The climate debt issue is, of course, much larger in a certain sense, right? Because you're really talking about revolutionary transfers of wealth. You're talking about upsetting the entire system of northern accumulation, right? Because northern GDP, again, there's a false concreteness in taking all the numbers at face value, of course. But we know northern GDP grows at around 3% a year, right? Something like this. So you're actually asking for... uh controlled shrinkage of northern gdp and you know these abstractions um can be or this way of quantifying things can be very confusing but what's important is to understand that in essence these are calls for these are calls for the elimination of imperialism and capitalism right um the numbers kind of stand in for the broader process that's being demanded and So it's very clear then why these demands had to be suppressed in the entire left progressive Green New Deal discussion. It's clear that if some people are trying to formulate a Green New Deal that is social democratic, then by definition, you cannot have anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial demands that actually have a cutting edge. in terms of actually cutting apart the history, the residue and ongoing mechanisms of oppression. Whereas figures like Naomi Klein, for example, talk a very good game about things like settler colonialism and maybe even sometimes imperialism. But they don't actually identify the historical mechanisms or the present mechanisms through which it operates or put forward serious ways of dismantling those mechanisms. And that's the pay to play. I mean, she would not have that visibility if she put forward a defense of the Cochabamba People's Agreement in the current context.

Speaker 2: Right. And you say that, you know, the whole stuff, most people know about, you know, wages and equal exchange, but they don't maybe extend it to ecological and equal exchange. They don't realize the wages. The South is also exchanging, the Global South is exchanging natural resources way below and just being ecologically devastated because of this. One, maybe to follow up a bit on this, because the Green New Deal, I think, in the U.S. appears maybe more progressive than it appears in other parts. It's because of the strength of basically capital, fossil capital, to put it in Andreas Mal's way. Because it does seem to be more of a fight between two countries. Let's say a Social Democrat Green New Deal seems to be more of a fight between two sectors of capital than actually a progressive platform. So do you think that also affects the way we see the Green New Deal here and why it's maybe harder to make that intervention?

Max Ajl: It needs more research on the cross-cutting ways that... the fossil fuel industries are owned, in fact. And I think this is very, very poorly examined. I can understand why it seems that way from the outside. But if one looks, I think once one gets to the more detailed plans, some of that may not really be the case. And again, it probably, you know, I myself haven't looked at it. per se from that angle. But if you look at, for example, the major strategy documents that the ruling class is drafting in order to deal with the climate crisis and the World Economic Forum or the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative, there tends to be a diffuse set of strategies and strategic silences when it comes to the fossil fuel industry. And so in my opinion, this reflects, of course, there is for sure there's a closed doors jockeying going on related to the sectors of capital that are more closely tied to fossil fuel versus maybe those which are more distant from fossil fuel. But part of the problem is that everyone, in fact, the entire infrastructure is tied to fossil fuel, right? And you actually, so this is actually kind of a fundamental basis of reproduction of capital is the energy, it's energetic sources, right? Then there are, of course, those who are directly invested in fossil fuel and their reserves, right? And they have a massive fixed infrastructure, both in terms of the actual reserves they own and in terms of refining and so forth. Of course, this is less urgent now. than it was 50 years ago, right? 50 years ago, the reserves were directly owned by the Northern Asia, more than 50 years ago now. I'm forgetting what year we are. But the reserves used to be directly owned by the oil majors, right? By the US oil majors and then a bit of France and England. Now, the situation is shifting quite a lot. Now the reserves themselves are directly owned by sovereign southern or semi-sovereign southern governments. So if there actually is an abrupt shift Some of the countries that would be taken out by that are massive strategic obstacles, whether they're actually anti-systemic strategic obstacles or they're just rival powers to the United States, right? If there was actually a shift away from fossil fuels, you would take out Venezuela, you would take out Iran, you would take out Russia. So there's lights and shadows to that. There's also the fact that in some of these documents, and I'm not sure I go into it in the book, I can't quite recall, frankly. I wrote it a while ago, and it would be just a couple of lines. They are contemplating the likelihood of an eventual nationalization or decommissioning of the fossil fuel companies themselves. So this is definitely on the ruling class horizon, that this is a real possibility just because there's objective scientific aspects going on related to fossil fuel burning that they know sooner or later has to be dealt with. So this is one aspect. Now, if the time horizon is sufficient and there's enough planning going on, it's not very difficult to offer restitution to the shareholders. And they also, again, if the time horizon is long enough, you just seize investing in the restoration of the fixed capital and shift it over to a different form of production, whether that's energy, whether that's if enough state subsidies go into carbon capture and storage to bring it online. So it doesn't strike me that there is this major rupture. It does strike me that one could summon up a political force that is focused on the existing cleavages between those sectors most directly invested in fossil capital and those sectors which are not most directly invested in it and actually working on that cleavage. But as usual with most of these cockamamie reformist, social democratic kind of plans, right? You really – it's not just – by definition, you're trailing a certain sector of capital, right?

Speaker 2: And this is the same as happened with the New Deal.

Max Ajl: But it's not just that. It's that the ruling class right now is not tolerating any challenge. So it's like why – The idea that this should be the actual strategy is completely bonkers to me. And I think there's a chronic overestimation of the degree of political mobilization in the United States. I mean, I think there's a high degree of political awareness and raised consciousness. Obviously, that has not translated to political mobilization, no matter who is the mayor of Buffalo, sorry to say. And forget Ocasio-Cortez, who was just not a democratic socialist, let alone an eco-socialist. Now, so the one point I wanted to circle back to that I think I probably departed too quickly from is this question of the strategy of the fossil fuel companies. Now, their strategy is essentially one of postponement, right? Because they've known about the crisis since the 70s or 80s. um some people say even earlier now they of course uh have launched a massive PR campaign to sow confusion about the nature of the crisis and the role of fossil fuel burning contributing to the crisis. And this, of course, is about protecting their fixed assets, right? That is basically risk protection. And what a lot of people are speculating is that they're hoping that carbon capture and storage can get off the ground. eventually and that the fossil economy doesn't actually have to cease that it can continue if carbon capture and storage eventually gets off the ground or for that matter if the geoengineering uh kind of sky fix if that is is deployed and that's much less speculative i mean that's speculative in the sense that no one knows what would really happen if you do black in the sky, right? No one knows what the long-term or short-term ramifications of it could just be the end of life on earth. Right. But there's there is a sense that that is the feasible. Right. The physics of that are clear, relatively speaking, as I understand it, that it's known what to do. It's kind of increasingly feasible to do it. It's just completely insane. Whereas the energetics of carbon capture and storage are. And the economics of it can't really even get off the ground. That's why it's not even being done. It's not even clear it can be rolled out on any basis.

Speaker 2: I mean, even if we know the most basic physics, you never know what's going to happen after. You can shoot something to the sky, but who knows what.

Max Ajl: Yeah, well, they know that less sun will hit the earth, right? This they can, to my understanding, this aspect of the consequence, they're very clear about. But beyond that, I don't think, of course, no one knows.

Speaker 2: You have a very strong critique of eco-modernism, which I really agree with. of other ways of doing things, you know, like agroecology or the Cuban models for sustainable agriculture. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on this critique? You know, why you say it's, you know, painting red, the capitalist technologies and all these things.

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So the eco-modernism, which also is increasingly embraced by, let us call it the platform left, which we can go into if you want, is basically... Embracing the technologies that are promoted by the kind of more experimental edge of the capitalist agenda and saying that if you insert these technologies and also to some extent change the social relations, then we can have a better world and it will have limitless abundance. It'll be far more, if not infinitely productive. And the major challenges in terms of dealing with the climate crisis are not merely technological, because I think a lot of what I'm proposing is technological as well, as long as we remember that agriculture is a technology, which I think is important and often gets missed in some of these conversations, that no one is against technology in terms of the application human ingenuity, human scientific investigation in order to make the world a better place. The question is settling on which types of technology we're talking about and also keeping in mind the stark distinction between industrial and non-industrial technologies. That industrial technologies are working on, basically are blind to the needs of natural cycles because they are working on dead material that's been metabolized by pressures and tectonic plates and so forth. This process can only produce poison. This is just natural. This is what happens when you mine ore and process ore and burn up coal. What happens when you produce petrochemicals and so forth? You produce waste. There's no other way to do it. These fantasies of circular economies to the side. Whereas you can do agriculture without producing waste. So these are very different. These are qualitatively distinct forms of technology. Now, the eco-modernist illusion is basically, first, that we can solve everything using industrial technology. anything that's being done in a non-industrial way at the current moment should in fact be levered onto an industrial form of production, especially agriculture. And that these industrial forms of production are much more productive and use less, have a much lighter impact on the land than non-industrial forms of production. And again, this is a kind of the most ridiculous, sloppily I mean, it's like a kind of half-blind positivism, right? And that they're like, okay, it's having less impact on the land because there's land over there and it's no longer being impacted in this specific way, except... Where are you going to get the inputs from? Well, the inputs come from El Salvador, or they come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or they come from Bolivia, or they come from Indonesia, or they come from Western China, and then they're processed in Malaysia. In other words, they're processed and produced in the third world. the raw materials kind of common and refined form for inputs into northern ecomodernist production. So this fantasy is basically simultaneously based on the idea that you could decouple production from, that you can decouple economic growth from inputs. Now, there is some evidence of partial decoupling of economic growth from inputs carbon dioxide in certain nations. But this obviously is not occurring remotely fast enough for it to resolve the environmental crisis. That's completely off the agenda. No one takes that seriously. Now, there's no evidence of decoupling when it comes to inputs, because it's clear that if you're burning less carbon dioxide, you're getting energy and so forth from somewhere, and you're using materials that And those materials are, you know, coming from the third world. So this is eco-modernism basically is the application of these technologies. Now, I've been talking about the very material, concrete rather, aspects of these technologies. But there's another aspect too, which is that these eco-modernist technologies are backed by venture capital. Almost every single one, right? Except for the even more pernicious ones, which are not backed by venture capital, but which are backed, for example, by the U.S. government, like the Green Revolution, which Aaron Bastani praises in his book, which was published by Verso, right? And which should stagger anyone's mind to tell them that it's appropriate to defend the Green Revolution. Now, these technologies, they're privately owned. Right. The intellectual property and the intellectual property is a primary mechanism of uneven accumulation and value transfer from the south to the north. This has been recognized since the 70s. And what the eco modernists are saying is that, OK, we are going to rely exclusively on these private, privately developed technologies or these northern owned technologies. And they are going to be the means through which we can achieve a worldwide technological salvation. The more clever ones who understand that you have to splash red on eco-modernist ideas, of course, say, okay, no, we shouldn't let the private corporations develop these technologies, in fact. Now, and so they should be socialized and R&D should be socialized. And of course, this kind of brackets the question what technologies are appropriate for human beings or for a good society, for a communist society. No one even asked that question, right? Or it's not, one will be hard pressed to the literature to find a serious framing or even a hypothesis, even leaving it open. Like what technological ensemble or what technological suite or what set of technologies are of various types would be most appropriate for specific aims, say satisfying worldwide human basic needs with a controlled impact on the environment, right? For me, this is actually like such a basic question in terms of thinking about our future as human anti-capitalist human beings. You know, that is the basic question of, communist development path is what I just put forward, right? Satisfying the basic needs of everybody on earth. What is the technology that's appropriate to that? That question is never asked. And I think this is a huge part of the problem. And once we ask that question, one of the answers is gonna be agroecology because agroecology, first of all, is basically relying on a decenter, non-commodified form of knowledge that exists primarily amongst poor people in the third world primarily, but also in the first world, and works with rather than against natural cycles, preserves the environment, often increases the amount of use values that are available to people, whether that's by increasing yields or whether that's by suppressing or eliminating input costs or a combination of the two. So this tends to work very well, not always, but often. And one of the aspects of it that should be very appealing to people who believe in things like workers' control and decentralization of the socioeconomic and political control of the society is that this is actually working, this is based on the creative energy and intellect and skills and learning capacity of the people. Right. Like agroecology is based on thinking, OK, people can manage their own or ideally, of course, in cooperatives because to believe in cooperatives. But ideally, people can manage their own farms using their own knowledge, sharing knowledge with one another. And there can be research institutes devoted both to the transmission of knowledge and taking knowledge, using the knowledge of the people involved. applying laboratory style experimentation to it. But the point is that this relies on a popular initiative and will and creative generative capacity and capabilities of poor rural people. And this should be wonderful to anyone who considers themselves a communist. Like we're talking about a technology that is in its very nature and the very way it's braided into social production is actually based on empowering workers because that's what Farmers are, right? They're workers who work in the field. And in fact, it's, you know, and tragically, although maybe things are starting to shift, but like agroecology is not receiving a whole lot of love on the Western left. I mean, in its, let us say, in its more conservative the more Marxist-oriented sectors of the Western left, because I'm also probably accepting a certain delimited understanding of Western left when I say that, because there's a lot, if you go to indigenous leftists, or if you go to the Black left, or the Puerto Rican left, or if you just go to kind of a left populist left, or the anarchist left, you have actually a huge, a much bigger interest in agroecology. But yeah, so those are... Those are some initial thoughts.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the intellectual property thing is something not discovered. We saw with the COVID vaccine what happens when some countries consider intellectual property. But something you mentioned here is, you know, the idea of separating use value and exchange value. And that ties in with your thoughts about degrowth on the book. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on your thoughts on degrowth?

Max Ajl: Yeah, so degrowth is tricky because degrowth is a very, very broad school. Increasingly, it's as broad as communists. And so if you talk to someone who's a communist, if you want to have a good interchange with them, you need to understand what kind of communist they are. You can't just assume you're going to be on the same ground with them, let alone someone's like a leftist. Well, lots of leftists hate one another, and I'm not... I'm not of the opinion that that's wrong. Like, I think there's plenty of leftists who are worth hating and who are absolutely the enemies of humanity, right? Calling for sanctioning Iran and so forth. Like, sure, you're a leftist, but we don't have anything in common. So to degrowth, I mean, the degrowth has got along better than leftists, to be sure. But there's a huge diversity of opinion. It's not a homogenous camp at all. And so you have... wonderful degrowthists who are very much in support of the popular development efforts going on in Venezuela. You know, they might find themselves more allied with the people and have a certain hesitance with regard to the state. But in general, they are very much opposed to the U.S. imposing its will on Venezuela, and they're supporting the Palestinian national liberation struggle. So I'm thinking of my comrades who I have a lot of respect for across and around the Uneven Earth, for example, or someone like Jason Hickel, for example. Now, there's also de-growthers who are a bit sloppy when it comes to their understanding of how capitalism works, right? They think capitalism has a growth imperative. And I think this is a little tricky. I think it's true that of course, that Northern capitalism has a growth imperative, but the best growth rates are some of the best growth rates of historical capitalism were under externally imposed, you know, semi-command economies, right? and during, you know, what's called, what's been called by the confusers of Western Marxism, like the Fordist Golden Age or whatever. I mean, that was externally imposed by the USSR and the National Liberation Movement in China. The Catholics didn't want that. That form of prosperous growth was actually externally imposed. There's other social formations or there's other national societies that are not allowed to grow at all that would face imposed shrinkage. is not a socialist society. I really wish it were, because then we would be in great shape. But it's not. But it is not allowed to grow, right? The U.S. actually wants to impose shrinkage on Iran. Now, it's not that I think the de-growthers would argue with these propositions per se, but it's that they don't pay enough attention to them in the formulation of their discourse. And Insofar, I think often they have a good contribution to the discussion, but some of it is appallingly Eurocentric. Again, no more Eurocentric than most of the Marxist left. But nevertheless, a huge amount of Eurocentrism, lack of attention to war, lack of attention to imperialism, total disinterest in a theory of uneven exchange or a theory of polarized accumulation on a world scale. So, again, like one, you know, I hesitate a bit to characterize degrowth on the whole as A, B, C, or D because there is no whole, right? There is not an iron core, in my opinion, of degrowth. And some of the growthers, even ones who I'm cool with, would probably disagree with that. And that's fine. But I don't see there being an iron core of it other than saying we want to throw an ideological wrench in this idea that growth is what's needed for prosperity. And that I agree in a sense. But nevertheless, I agree. I think it's better to be more precise in terms of our formulations in the sense that there are use values we want more of. And there are other things we want lesser that we do indeed want to degrow. I mean, we want to degrow the U.S. I'm speaking for myself, at least, and I hope for you guys as well. We want to degrow the U.S. military. This is a catastrophic waste of everything, of resources. It's a catastrophic misuse of human potential and needs. It's catastrophic for the environment. It's catastrophic for the third world. So we want to degrow the U.S. military, but we want to grow the U.S. capacity to produce renewable energy technology very, very fast, as fast as possible. And we want to degrow the fossil fuel industry and grow... a nationalized but hopefully partially decentralized system of, say, cooperative worker-owned factories that are producing solar panels and that are producing run-of-the-river hydrogen, for example. We want to degrow the entire bureaucracy centered around the healthcare system and possibly even we want to degrow some of the more experimental end-of-life cares that actually don't Produce a lot of care for human beings. And we want to grow preventative community centered medicine, along with systematic nutrition consultation, especially for poor people. Right. And we want to we even want to degrow the amount of calories that are produced maybe in the United States. because a huge amount of calories produced per capita in the United States. And a lot of it goes to animal feed. A lot of it goes to ethanol. A lot of it goes to corn syrup. So we want to degrow that. And we actually want planned land use, land use planning to say what should grow on each plot of land at any given time using scientific methods of evaluation and in consultation with the farmers who are trained in agroecological forms of production. So we want growth in the number of farmers using agroecological production in the United States, but probably a decrease in aggregate calorie output. This allows us to kind of better understand. And so and on the whole, right, at a slightly more elevated level of objection, we want to degrow those portions of the technological base, which only subsist based on even ecologically uneven exchange, right, which rely on inputs from the third world in order for them to exist for these kind of to reproduce and contribute to the accumulation of capital in the core. Those technologies really we need to degrow to the point where they are either paying comparatively fair prices based on labor inputs and environmental damage to the third world or a system of even exchange like Cuba did with the Soviet Union for a period of time. or certain technologies just may have to go entirely as we were discussing. So I think this is a clear way of framing the discussion, which I don't take as a slight on degrowth. I think they would agree with it. Nevertheless, I think this allows us to more clearly approach the fundamental issues and also not... Not get caught up in arguments with the eco-modernist camp who think we want to impose austerity on the working class. No one wants to impose austerity on the working class except for Derek Johnson. It's not part of any serious conversation anymore.

Speaker 2: Continuing on that topic a bit, you really center agriculture and land and food sovereignty. And what do you think that this type of analysis brings to those who overlook the sector in favor of more common subjects? Again, we've talked about green energy. We've talked a bit about land. What do you think centering land gives us?

Max Ajl: Well, I think in addition to the other things I've been discussing, I think it helps us avoid what I've been thinking of as a carbon emissions or a climate reductions. That's the first thing. What I mean by that is that increasingly a lot of the climate discussion is centered around technocratic interventions that are centered on only climate change. And this is what allows a figure like Andreas Malm. I mean, he allows himself to do quite a lot, most of the Parnassus. I won't go too much into that. But this is what allows him, for example, to focus on carbon capture and storage as a technology, because he doesn't actually have a holistic ecological outlook. our world system and the natural systems within which we live and within which there are biodiversity crises, there are aquifer pollution crises, there are cancer crises. These are all, of course, organically linked to the specific forms of not fossil capital, but actually capitalist industrialization. And the fact that the US especially, but it's probably not only over industrialized, but also that there are what the Latin Americans used to call specific styles of development that are kind of in an elective affinity with these patterns of over-industrialization. And over-industrialization, I don't mean... I mean merely that the specific kind of industrial artifacts that have been settled upon by capitalism Could we could produce similar services in a way that would have fewer ecological impacts? And just to take something very simple, cars versus mass transit. Right. One is smaller. socially more efficient, and environmentally less damaging. Yet both cars and mass transit can be produced with probably close to net zero carbon emissions, right? I mean, you can produce batteries for cars and so forth, or have them subsist on charging stations and so forth. So we need a broader understanding, both a social and ecological understanding, to understand what are the costs and benefits of these respective forms of technology, these respective styles of development that become very path-dependent, especially in the North, but also increasingly in the South, right? And it becomes harder and harder to shift away from them. And you can't just plug and play with this kind of carbon capture and storage. You take out... um you know that you can just draw down the co2 and you've resolved uh the environmental crisis whereas the biodiversity crisis the extension crisis i mean no one knows what's going to happen with that you know i don't have i can't i can't claim to be an expert in this field at all but uh you know no one knows what's going to happen when you keep on ripping away threads of the web of life right we don't know what's going to happen to our biosphere um you know, when the pollinators, are we supposed to artificially pollinate everything? So we just don't know, right? And this is a catastrophe, right? And this is why You know, if you're a technocratic manager offering proposals to the ruling class, like Robert Pond or something, yeah, sure, focus just on CO2. But if you're looking at building an ecological communist society, then you focus on the broader climate issue. And the agriculture is the technology, which is the primary human interface with the non-human world. I mean, the primary kind of blanket covering the world is agricultural. It's not an urban fabric. It's an agricultural fabric. And if that blanket is asphyxiating, which is the case of industrial agriculture, then you're going to destroy a lot of the natural world. And if it's kind of a porous blanket that is made of natural materials, then it can be in a beneficial interaction that preserves biodiversity in the natural world. So this is one reason that I think agriculture is... So primary, I mean, I think agriculture is so important also because agriculture and also food and, you know, I should have spent more time on food, frankly, but in the chapter on agriculture, but food and agriculture allow for the formation of widespread alliances, right? Everybody eats food. And everybody who has the capacity, and I don't mean mental capacity, I mean the kind of space in terms of their life to worry about it, is concerned about where their food comes from and whether or not it's good food. There's nobody who doesn't want to feed their kids good food. Such a person doesn't exist. In fact, the ruling class is obsessed with food. the quality of the food that the ruling class should eat and is far less obsessed with, you know, it prefers to give shit to everybody else on the planet, right? So food is really a mechanism for a widespread popular alliance between most of the working classes of the planet, right? uh the working and popular middle classes i mean everyone converge on this and it's like okay if you need want a good food that's not produced in a poisonous way then these working conditions need to apply in the countryside and this type of land use planning and it's a way of i think it's a powerful mechanism of raising consciousness about these broader issues very much related to related to the environmental management of society. I mean, a third issue is, of course, that at basis, the agrarian structure of the third world is the base of the pyramid for accumulation on a world scale. And this is also very poorly discussed. But I think the people who have put forward the absolutely devastating, compelling analysis of this, Utsan Prabhupada in their theory of imperialism, And explaining that these kind of reserve armies of labor are these huge labor reservoirs, the terminology they use in the third world, actually serve to depress wages in the third world. And so they're the basis and part of one of the bases of uneven exchange. And furthermore, this reservoir, in fact, stabilizes capitalism in the core, right? because this reservoir is a threat on multiple levels to working class struggles in the North. Working class struggles in the North are segmented from it through borders and through nationalist, corporatist political mechanisms. But at the same time, there is a threat of offshore. It's always possible to large portions and ever-increasing portions of the first world, working and middle, even professional classes, right? And that in turn relies on subsistence of this kind of uh labor reservoir in the third world who whose uh incomes are basically being depressed below the um below the level needed for a kind of basic social reproduction right below there's below subsistence extreme super exploitation marini's words right so this is a way of bringing that into the conversation i mean it's clear that that's not what a green new deal book is exactly about, but I think that a green new deal is about what, what we're going to do with capitalism. Like I want to get rid of capitalism. And if so, if capitalism is resting on what's going on in the third world countryside, then a green new deal needs to at least broach that topic, even though obviously it's not necessarily going to have a whole theoretical, an extended theoretical excursus reflecting, but it's very much related.

Speaker 2: I was wondering if you ever read Raj Patel's Green New Deal for Agriculture and what you thought about that.

Max Ajl: I read some of it. Not always able to keep up with the literature that's published when I'm in Tunisia because I don't have a printer. But I think it's great. I mean, I think this is a much more... This is a much more detailed proposal than probably than I have for my book. But I think it's I think this is hugely important. The reconstruction of firstborn agriculture is incredibly important. There needs to be a agrarian reform. There needs to be land use planning. There needs to be a full conversion to agroecology. This is fundamental, and this could really change the way the U.S. sits in the world, and it could make people's lives, certainly in the imperial core, but also indirectly in the periphery, a lot better. So I just think it's extremely important, and it's very neglected in the metropolitan, kind of urban-centric countries. industrial-centric, policy-centric, technocratic analysis.

Speaker 2: So maybe just to give you one more question to wrap up. So if you had to basically tell someone who might be excited about Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, just some words on why they should think a bit more about this, why they should think about land struggles, some takeaways from this interview or from your book, what would that be?

Max Ajl: Sure. So I would say essentially that unless we are aiming to overthrow capitalism, then what we're basically looking at is the management of capitalism, which kind of is basically like tying up a dog with rabies, that it's a very dangerous beast that could easily and historically always has, you know, broken free of its restraints and actually proceeded to consume life and livelihood, both in the third world and also the first world. I mean, that's one aspect of it. Another fundamental aspect of it is that Ocasio-Cortez, for example, to be very concrete, is not proposing the nationalization and the elimination of the first world economy. energy companies, the hydrocarbon companies, the oil companies, co-exploration. She doesn't even demand we put a cease to that. She doesn't demand we put an end to the military-industrial complex. It's one of the major producers of carbon dioxide in the first place. And she doesn't demand that we have a full-scale transition to renewable energies by 2030, which is the earliest feasible one can possibly imagine. And she doesn't call for climate debt. And if you want to live in a just world for everybody, then you have to give the people of the third world their due, as the people of the third world have demanded themselves in their own consensual policy documents, like the Corte Habana People's Agreement. So if one wants to fight for something that is currently not possible, and both the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal and a much more radical agenda are both not possible, one should fight for the more radical agenda. because what kind of world do you want to live? Do you want to live in the world with the military and ongoing fossil fuel burning and degradation of the global south and ongoing environmental crisis and industrial, capitalist agriculture? Or do you want to live in a different world that's substantively decommodified and with climate debt and no military and lots of hospitals and schools and parks and... And fruit trees everywhere. And refugees. There are no more refugee crises because people's home countries are really beautiful places to live that aren't being devastated. Which of those worlds do you want to fight for? That's the question that is on the table for anybody when they take up this task of fighting for their dignity, right?

Speaker 2: Well, thanks for your time. So I appreciate it. And the listeners, just remember, like us, share, subscribe, the usual things. And see you next time.

Speaker 1: . .