Only Anti-Imperialism Can Save Us From Climate Catastrophe, With Max Ajl

Rania Khalek: Hello, everyone. I'm Rania Khalek, and this is Dispatches. The Green New Deal has become a popular slogan among progressive Democrats in recent years. But we need to be wary of the capitalist class co-opting the energy around doing something about climate change to maintain the imperialist global order they benefit from. To discuss this and more, I'm joined by Max Eil, a postdoc at Fageneggen University and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and relevant to what we're going to be speaking about today. He's the author of the new book, A People's Green New Deal, published by Pluto Press. Max, welcome.

Max Ajl: Thank you for having me.

Rania Khalek: So before we get into some of the heavier and darker topics covered in your book, which is all wrapped up in really, as I see it, the need to, I think, dismantle imperialism in order to mitigate the worst impacts of this existential climate emergency that we're in. Let's start by giving people an idea of what you mean when you say a people's Green New Deal. How is that different than what people like, say, AOC have popularized? And then we can go from there because there are different Green New Deals, which you kind of talk about in your book. The most popular among them tend to maintain the exploitative relationship with capitalism and imperialism. So can you describe how these are different?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. It's a crucial question. So when one is examining the social structure with an eye towards what one wishes to do to change it, one can adopt essentially two perspectives. One can think about softening the worst aspects of the current social structure for a certain portion of the world population, or one can think about actually making a just world for everybody on the planet. This is the classic distinction between a reformist approach and a revolutionary approach or a modification or a dismantling of the existing world system based on capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. If we actually read the Ocasio-Cortez marquee, Green New Deal, which was not a maneuver that was very frequently resorted to by the people who decided to be its voluntary salespeople, one understands that it was not actually advocating the dismantling of all the oppressive characteristics and mechanisms which constitute our world. Some very small examples. One, there was no call for demilitarization of the United States. Two, there was no call for the nationalization of the U.S. domestic oil companies. Three, there was no call for climate debt repayments to the third world. Four, there was no call for the overall abolition of domestic capitalism. Now, those are basic constituent elements of an actual radical program that would deserve to be called socialist because socialism should aim both at the domestic abolition of capitalism and the international abolition of imperialism. So if we look instead at what an internationalist People's Green New Deal would look like, It would aim for the nationalization and dismantling of the petroleum corporations and also the nationalization of all corporations in the United States. It would completely end the Pentagon complex, including the comprehensive demilitarization of the United States. It would have comprehensive climate debt repayments from the north to the south of around $3.2 trillion a year, as has been explicitly demanded by the southern nations, most notably Bolivia. It would have a widespread agrarian reform. It would have decommodified access to housing and health care, first of all, for everyone in the United States, but also as a wider ambition to assist the countries of the South in also providing these needed social services for their own populations. So these are very different orientations, not merely in terms of how we go about changing the world, but the kind of world we wish to see. And one of the fundamental problems is that through the marketing apparatus through which what passes for the left is actually presented to a wide public in the United States and abroad, more or less reformist and at best social democratic Green New Deal was actually represented and sold as an eco-socialist Green New Deal in the process confusing a lot of people who end up perpetually disappointed by the positions of Ocasio-Cortez when in fact Ocasio-Cortez is relatively clear in her own words not always all that clear and sometimes quite opaque and muddled, but relatively clear enough about what she's standing for and what she's fighting for. It's just that her spokespeople, voluntary, like Naomi Klein, for example, are less than clear about what the actual objectives are and what means are going to be used to achieve them.

Rania Khalek: So Max, democratic socialism, as we all know, has been on the rise as an idea popularized by Bernie Sanders and then furthermore by AOC in the last, I guess, like four or five years. Can you explain why democratic socialism is not sufficient enough to solve the climate change crisis, at least for most of the world. It might fix things for a few countries if it can actually be implemented, but the vast majority of the world, if I'm not mistaken, would remain in extreme poverty and even worse. Can you explain why democratic socialism cannot save us from this climate emergency?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So in the first case, we have to distinguish between democratic socialism as a bundle of policies that would be very helpful in terms of improving the lives of suffering people in Europe and the United States, and democratic socialism as a historical phenomenon that was actually implemented, that actually implemented those policies. And by separating out these two things, we can get a better understanding of the challenges or in many ways and possibilities of putting in place any sort of democratic resolution in the ways that it's currently being struggled for, as well as the limits of such a resolution on a world scale. So if we're talking about policies, if we're talking about things like universal free healthcare, if we're talking about uncommodified and free or low cost housing, if we're talking about massive increases in minimum wages, if we're talking about very cheap or even free food, if we're talking about very cheap or even free access to heating and electricity, these are policies that anybody in the world should essentially have access to. And this is what is very commonly understood when people talk about democratic socialism. And furthermore, these are the defense of these policies is why people who are advocating democratic socialism in a country like the United States are so popular. And so that's understandable. And we shouldn't have any sort of rejection of the idea that these are policies, these are changes in what things cost or what people can have easy access to that are wrong. But the problem is that democratic socialism has to, it doesn't just come from the clouds like mana, it actually has to be implemented through a struggle. So we'd have history that could teach us what was actually necessary to implement democratic socialism historically in Europe and the United States. And we know that democratic socialism during its kind of heyday, say from 1945 to 1980, in the United States, it took the form of Fordism, which was a social compromise between capital and labor. It wasn't quite democratic socialist. But this occurred because there were massive threats coming from the Soviet Union, Communist China, which had just liberated the largest population on earth, and the national liberation struggles themselves, which were very frequently and increasingly in the orbit of both the Soviet Union and even more so Communist China. And they were thinking, this is how we're going to organize our societies. So democratic socialism basically put forward the idea to the working class that they should, in the core states, in Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, that the working classes should continue to see their interests as aligned with their states as well as imperialism. And how that worked was that there was both domestic capitalism endured throughout Europe, the United States. And there also continued to be capitalist relations of production and extraction, meaning exploitation all over the third world, which meant that countries continued to be very unequal in terms of their domestic agrarian structure. Even though there were a lot of nationalizations that were very often continued to be the private control of industrial plants, commerce, banking continued to be outside the control of third world nations and so forth. So basically this what what democratic socialism actually looked like when it was implemented had at least. one major problem is that it continued to exist alongside massive exploitation and the private ownership of the means of production. And it was implemented alongside a worldwide struggle that was aiming at much further horizons. And democratic socialism was put in, or social democracy was put in place as a way of avoiding the implementation of these radical changes of property relations, the eradication of the private ownership of property in the capitalist heartlands, in Europe, in the United States. Now, if we look at current struggles for democratic socialism, of course, it's understandable why they're popular. They're popular because capitalism is delegitimized as a mode of rule, because people's lives are very difficult because health care costs are extreme, because housing costs are extreme. So there's an understandable allure for different ways of organizing society. But in the first case, we have many historical experiments of what happens when you try to struggle for democratic socialism, when there is no Soviet Union, when there is no communist China, when the national liberation movements are And the states they've conquered are basically in retreat or under siege, as is the case in Bolivia and Venezuela. You don't get democratic socialism, you get the absolute destruction of these political forces that are fighting for democratic socialism, as example, as what happened to Bernie Sanders. as what happened to Jeremy Corbyn, as what happened to Syriza, as what happened to Podemos, right? These forces had absolutely no discernible success in actually implementing their programs. They set the stage for at least some kind of more nationalist redistribution in the core, for example, in the Biden program, certainly. And they also set the stage for a much wider popularity of some vague idea of socialism. Absolutely. But did they actually implement their programs, which were themselves not anti-capitalist? No. So what does this tell us? This tells us that unless you have an actual genuine threat to capitalist property relationships, then you will not even get democratic socialism. And then furthermore, even if you've got democratic socialism, you're still going to have imperialist relations with the periphery. It's going to rely on a massive subjugation of a lot of the rest of the world. This is not a thing that most decent people, once they understand that, would actually fight for. And this is why the discussion of imperialism is usually suppressed entirely in these conversations, right? Now, of course, this is all connected very closely to the climate question, because the The most central North-South, for example, contradiction in the climate question is this question of climate debt. And so it's very clear that if you wanna maintain private monopoly control over the means of production in the North, you're not going to be prone to giving $3.2 trillion of climate debt to the South every year as a down payment on the broader colonial debt. It's unthinkable one's going to do that if your horizon is domestic democratic socialism and keeping domestic property structures intact. It just isn't going to happen. And that's why climate debt has been suppressed on the broader agenda of these green social democratic green new deals, including from Bernie Sanders, where although there was more climate debt payments than I expected, they were far below the actual demands which the South demanded from the North.

Rania Khalek: I'm glad that you mentioned climate debt because that was actually my next question. Can you explain what that means, climate debt, why it's important, and maybe elaborate a bit on why it is that North American or global North progressives seem to ignore this issue?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So climate debt is actually an expansion of the concepts which emerged from the 1992 Rio Summit. At the 1992 Rio Summit, all the nations of the world agreed on the legal principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to deal with global warming and the environmental crisis. Now, common but differentiator responsibilities means that each country itself needs in some way or another to change the way things are produced in its national borders so that it stops putting carbon dioxide out into the atmosphere. Yeah. Differentiated means the way that responsibility is assumed and the actual political programs and economic programs through which that responsibility takes form would have to be very different in different countries. Now that's a baseline principle. So if you expand that out, you would see, and if you're principled and you're looking deeply into history, you would understand, for example, that if you look at the historical emissions of carbon dioxide, to take the most important component of emissions and the most important contribution to the climate debt issue, you would see that the North is overwhelmingly responsible for historical carbon dioxide emissions. That is, the United States overwhelmingly, England, Germany, France, to a lesser extent, Japan, Australia, to a far lesser extent, some of the Gulf states. These are the major historical emitters of carbon dioxide. Now, not just both on a national basis, but also on a historical per capita basis. So, for example, while the U.S. was emitting massive, massive amounts of carbon dioxide during the course of its industrial revolution, China, India, they were barely emitting any carbon dioxide at all. It's very recent that the countries of the South have started to understand emit any noticeable portion of carbon dioxide. And it's only very, very recent that they've started to really become major emitters, for example, especially in the case of Brazil, Indonesia, China, India, because these are huge countries. And it's only normal that if they're using carbon dioxide intensive production activities, they would actually emit a decent amount, because they're huge, in some cases, many, many times larger than the United States. But if we look at how much each country could theoretically have emitted if we wanted the world to have a good chance of staying below 1.5 Celsius of average warming, we would see that the G77, meaning basically the global south, is only a little bit over its space in the atmosphere, the amount it could have emitted if we wanted to stay below that amount. China is actually the only state that is actually now over its historical quota. And it's not over by a lot, right? People will talk very widely about the blame and responsibility of China for the global warming issue. But China is only... lightly over, and it's only in the last 13 years that it has actually exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide that it could safely emit, whereas overwhelmingly, the historical overshoot of carbon dioxide is a northern issue. And in fact, the north has taken the space that the south could have used to safely emit carbon dioxide that the oceans, that the trees, that vegetation could have safely absorbed and kind of metabolized, absorbed through photosynthesis or oceanic mechanisms of carbon dioxide absorption, etc.

Rania Khalek: Now, what does that mean?

Max Ajl: That means that There is climate debt. And the climate debt basically means that these countries cannot use the cheap developmental trajectories that the North used, right? Emitting and burning coal and emitting carbon dioxide. This was a very cheap way to develop. And they cannot do that anymore if we want a stable and safe climate. And furthermore, they are already suffering under the impacts of climate change. So, for example, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Mozambique. We all know that there are natural disasters afflicting these countries, and we often even read about it in northern newspapers. And to adapt to that and to actually deal with those damages and still be able to carry out popular development policies, those countries don't need some kind of inclusion in global capitalism. They need reparations. And that's the adaptation and mitigation debt. So those payments are actually essential if these countries are actually able to carry out policies that enable them to survive and flourish amidst global warming.

Rania Khalek: So with all that in mind, you know, you you talk about in your book, you know, the fact that the ruling class is terrified of the third world gaining sovereignty over its own resources. And there's been a response to this this this very, I guess, well-founded fear if you want to maintain the global structure of inequality that we have now. of pushing this idea or the rising politics of demographic fear mongering, right? That there's too many people on the planet and that's the actual problem. And you talk about this idea being pushed and even in like liberal and progressive circles to some degree, and it's called half earth. So can you talk about that and why it's so dangerous? Because it's a pretty fascistic way of looking at the future.

Max Ajl: Right. It's absolutely colonial fascism, and we should not shy away from actually just naming it as what it is. Now, this emerges from a long strain of Western thinking around what's called Malthusianism, the idea that the poor are both incapable of controlling their numbers, and therefore they are over-consuming resources, and that their population growth is going eventually to outpace the growth in the availability of resources or specifically food, which was the classic concern of Malthus. And so in reaction to that, you basically need to not give the poor any type of aid and just allow them to die, right? This is the classical Malthusian position. And it's based on essentially a hatred of the poor. We actually know that the issue is quite the reverse, that first of all, In absolute terms, taking merely human beings is the issue. Population growth is a reaction to underdevelopment and not its cause. So people have a lot of children if they're so poor that they need to have a lot of children if they want, for example, to have enough labor to from adults or from older children for their family farm. They're going to have a lot of children because many of those children won't live past the age of five or 10. So it's normal to actually have a lot of children in reaction to underdevelopment. And if you actually wanna, even on an absolute basis, if you wanna reduce birth rates, You shouldn't focus on birth rates. You should focus on development, which is what people deserve anyway. That's the first issue. The second fundamental issue is that if we look at world per capita resource use, Africa on the whole, Bangladesh, to take the most extreme example, Gaza, don't really register on world per capita resources. They don't use very much of the world's resources. They underuse the world's resources, whereas countries, and it does make sense to talk about things in terms of countries, although it's also very important to talk about it in terms of capitalist relations of production, the countries of the North overuse resources. This is related to the systems, the private ownership of the means of production and irrational use of resources. world resources, of course. So this is why we should have an anti-capitalist position in reaction to the climate crisis. But we should also be very clear that the demographic problem is actually scaremongering. And the only reason people bring it up is, one, to deflect attention from private ownership, private monopoly ownership of the means of production, primarily by northern wealthy individuals and corporations, but also because there are ambitions to actually grab further resources from the South. And if you are agitating, you're stating that there's already too many people in the South, and you want to carry out reductions in their population. And this is what the Gates Foundation is explicitly doing. This is what, for example, David Attenborough is has been advocating. If you're claiming that you want to reduce so-called population pressure, this is because you want to carry out a grab of certain types of resources. Now, this is in lockstep with this idea of half-earth, which is based on a set of similar assumptions. The assumption is that humans, taken as this kind of blobby, homogenous whole, this kind of a cousin of this notorious... model-headed anthropocene concept, that humans on the whole are using too many resources. Therefore, you need to concentrate humans into a relatively small portion of the planet and reserve, say, 30%, say, 50% of the planet for biodiversity. Now, on the one hand, it's the ruling class probably is not remotely interested in doing it. They're kind of allowing this idea to be put forward because once you've concentrated, or maybe more to the point, ethnically cleansed large portions of third world populations from their land, from their forests, from their prairies, from their farmland, from their savannas, you can then make use of those resources for whatever you want. including having some portion of it as a kind of emergency biodiversity reserve, because they do understand the need to have some level of biodiversity in order to safeguard the web of life on the planet. That's a very important aim. If you want to ensure overall kind of ecosystem stability, then this is an understandable motivation. But much more to the point, once you've ethnically cleansed those populations and you grab the resources, you do whatever you want with them. And so that's why there is a lot of talk about half-earth, both on the right and, of course, increasingly on the left. For example, the most notorious has been Kim Stanley Robinson, who – more or less picks up his ideas from whatever is floating around the leftist intellectual ecosphere and picked up on this idea of half earth and thought, oh, that's a rational concept. Why don't we compress the population into half the earth? And just to add the last issue related to that, this is really based on an apartheid concept, which comes from Western thought that humans came to be thought of as something distinct from nature. Now, it's true that humans are analytically distinct from nature, but it's not true that humans need to live walled off behind apartheid walls from nature, that humans are actually historically excellent managers and custodians of biodiversity and above all, indigenous people. And so there's no reason that human production and human social life and human civilization, human modernity and complicated interconnected social life with division of labor needs to exist walled off from nature. This is only, this is a facet of our kind of contemporary capitalist pathologies.

Rania Khalek: It's really frightening because, I mean, when you talked about Gaza, for example, it's this really obviously intentional de-development to a very extreme degree. And it's literally denying people what they need to sustain their lives so that a portion of people can have more. I mean, you're talking about that, but on a global scale.

Max Ajl: Exactly.

Rania Khalek: Like a of the third world.

Max Ajl: Exactly. There was a briefly rather wide literature about Gaza as a laboratory or even worse, Gaza as a zoo. And I do think that in many senses, this kind of system of population control, of population concentration, of clustering the population and of racially allocating the right to development If we compare, for example, Israeli per capita energy use versus per capita energy use in Gaza, if we can compare Israeli per capita access to land versus per capita access to land in Gaza, et cetera, then we find just massive disparities, like disparities that are catastrophic and in excess of any other probably disparities that we can find elsewhere in the world. So this really is a model for what colonial capitalist civilization is willing to do to suffering people as a means to preserve the monopoly private control of means of production and to restrict the good life to some people and not allow others to have it.

Rania Khalek: It's green imperialism. I mean, that really does bring out the issue of like it's socialism. It's either we get socialism or fascism. It's like one or the other. And I guess people don't necessarily understand the ramifications of yeah all of this on a global scale like it's just it's never discussed like this i mean i i'm in lebanon we've kind of discussed this before i've discussed this with you before but you know being in lebanon it's like you do see it's it's people it's just this extreme inequality uh that people can't really fathom where the way some people are living is just like they really aren't consuming or producing for that matter And you're really talking about limiting the consumption to an extreme degree of like a huge portion of the world so that the colonial North can keep consuming the way they are. And that kind of brings me to another issue I wanted to ask you about, which is the, you know, the Michael Moore film. Now, the Michael Moore film got criticized for pushing what people said was this concept you just talked about, the Malthusian idea of too many people on the Earth. But one of the reasons it got criticized so much that went unsaid was because it went after this notion that we can continue to consume the way that we're consuming with renewable energy and that'll fix everything. And it really went after that hard. It kind of went after the NGO industrial complex that's kind of infiltrated the environmental movement in the US. Can you talk a little bit about the important things that that film raised and why the real reason it was attacked

Max Ajl: Right. Well, just briefly, I would say that there were two lines of attack. So there were there were actually legitimate attacks that came from leftists who launched attacks of it for for its Malthusian aspects and for sidestepping the resistance, for example, of indigenous people or people in the third world. And also the way it was shot in the United States, for example, and didn't mention U.S. settler colonialism. So there were two sets of attacks. That set of attacks was 100 percent valid. And the pity is it would have been a better film if it had included those sets of critiques. Then there was another set of critiques, which came from basically the nonprofit ecological industrial complex and its linked intelligentsia, including most of the mainstream and progressive environmental journalists, including, of course, Naomi Klein, but also including Bill McKibben. So these critiques basically accused it of being a conspiracy theory against renewable energy. And of course, there were a lot of technical flaws in the film, which should also be noted. But bracketing those technical flaws... the when we hear the word conspiracy theory we should keep in mind that uh capitalism happens in history it's carried out uh it's a process of accumulation and the private control of the means of production by individuals and because it is a small set of individuals this social process is by definition conspiratorial elite's rule is by definition conspiratorial because it is people coming together to conspire right so The idea of conspiracy theory is this kind of scarecrow that gets erected around certain ideas, certain concepts, certain notions, certain modes of analysis that are actually intended to scare us away from thinking and just doing actual empirical analysis of how power works. Instead, we're supposed to reside in these realms of abstractions and just be talking about capitalism without capitalists and colonialism without colonialists and racism without racists and corporatism or corpocracy without... actual corporations who are carrying this out and the rule of foundations without actually naming the foundations. And you can't actually build a struggle against abstractions. Now, one of the excellent merits of this film is it pointed out, first of all, that renewables are not clean energy. Renewables are less dirty energy. Now, this is an important distinction because what that teaches us is that a non-dirty energy means that the material, less dirty energy, means that the material still have to come from somewhere and the waste still has to go somewhere. And the actual process of laying out the energy itself uses the earth in a specific way. And these are very common sense points that we should be able to incorporate into our conversation. And this is even accepted amongst the social democratic left that lithium comes from Bolivia, for example, and it has costs when it is extracted, which means that you should have community consultation around it, which means you need a sovereign state. And because you need a sovereign state, and that sovereign state could actually imperil the kind of reckless and wanton capitalist extraction of lithium, this is why they wanted to overthrow the Morales government, because the Morales government was a sovereign state that was capable of exercising national sovereign control over its resources. So that's one example. I mean, another example is that if you look at solar, if you look at large-scale hydroelectric, if you look at wind installations, these are sited in places, and if they're not sited carefully, then they will hurt people, for example. And this is already happening in southern Mexico. There's work by Alex Dunlap on this. There's work on how Jaime Franco, I believe, that is analyzing this process in northeastern Spain, that if these sites are not built up very carefully and conscientiously, that they also will cause immense environmental destruction. And finally, the waste... from these relatively short-lived installations will also cause environmental destruction. And this is not talking about massive hydro, which itself in Brazil has been a massive environmental crisis. Now, this does not mean in any way, shape or form that we should be against renewable energy. It means that the discussion on renewable energy needs to be associated with a discussion that each increment of renewable energy means damage to the environment and therefore You need to be both conscientious about where you cite renewable energy. You need to be conscientious and just about where the resources for renewable energy come from. And that finally, you cannot just build unlimited renewable energy. In any case, you can't really build unlimited renewable energy because you can't build unlimited anything. But it also means that one can open up a meaningful discussion about reducing overall northern energy use while still maintaining a good life for people in the north. Now, these were... These issues were totally suppressed in the film. That's one major issue. Another major issue is that there were critiques of, for example, Bill McKibben, who's a close ally for that matter of the self-described eco-socialist Naomi Klein. And Bill McKibben's 350.org is basically very closely tied to large foundations. And Bill McKibben's 350.org does not talk about capitalism. Furthermore, the 350.org and its campus divestment resolutions, in fact, pursued a deliberately depoliticizing approach. They were often encouraged to not work with Palestine activists and to link up divestment petitions. And so these were methods of—they encouraged methods of struggle that were themselves not particularly radical. And so if—and this is how dissent is managed in the United States. dissent is managed by channeling it into ways of struggle that are not particularly anti-systemic that ultimately accommodate the private control over the means of production and if you call out or identify the people who are in charge of managing corralling and channeling dissent then those people will obviously get very agitated and attack you as a conspiracy theorist

Rania Khalek: That's a really good breakdown. Now, I want to get into some of the fixes. You know, the ruling class is trying to salvage capitalism, obviously always trying to do that. And they're using the climate change paradigm to do that in some cases with complicity from the left. And you've alluded to some of that throughout this discussion. But, you know, you've mentioned these kinds of dream world fixes that we hear about sometimes. And you talk about in your book green moderation theory and its flaws and these technological advances that we're told by a lot, some people on the left, that can actually fix everything. And this goes beyond renewables. So can you talk about some of those dream world fixes and why they're problematic?

Max Ajl: Sure. So there's two sets of fixes that people have really concentrated on in a disturbing way. And there's one that no one bothers to take seriously. I mean, one that no one bothers to take seriously is this fantasy of asteroid mining that was put forward by Aaron Bastani in a book published by Verso, which advertised itself as the world's leading radical press. And he called for actually mining asteroids in space in order to provide unlimited wealth for everybody on Earth. Now, if you go ask NASA about that, NASA, which is basically a creature of the military industrial complex, they say, maybe you can send down some platinum. But in general, the idea of sending down minerals from the asteroids to earth is completely and utterly unfeasible. So it's a crackpot idea. Uh, It's a total crackpot idea that has no relationship to reality. And this was also, of course, coupled with a defense of the Green Revolution, which is well-known, set in motion the chain of processes which led to massive impoverishment in India and across the global south, and has culminated lately in hundreds of thousands of people actually ingesting pesticides as a means of suicide because they're so indebted. This is the Green Revolution that the radical book publisher Verso defends. Now, These technofixes are kind of clustered around very much around agriculture. I think this is easy because people in the first world generally don't understand or are interested in agriculture. They think it's something that's kind of just done out of sight, out of mind, definitely very little labor involved. And it's something that's easy to smuggle in very pernicious solutions or very pernicious technofixes. And I think both, of course, this clusters around this idea of half-earth. There's also a linked proposal for global veganism, which, of course, has been vigorously promoted on, again, what passes for the North Atlantic left, even though it's clear that...

Rania Khalek: I have to cop to being a former veganist.

Max Ajl: No, but, you know, we have to distinguish, too, because someone's going to accuse you of being sectarian.

Rania Khalek: Being a vegan is good if you can do it.

Max Ajl: If you can do it. The problem is not with vegans. The problem is with the specific forms that veganism has taken that includes these calls that are very explicit. You know, this is Astra Taylor, this kind of, you know, lefty filmmaker. And she's calling for that all the world should adopt a meatless diet. Now, what are you going to do with the 300 to 500 million people who are running around doing pastoralism? Did they ask if they want a meatless diet? I mean, what are you going to do with the people around the North Pole who have no other way to get food but from meat? And what are you going to do with the fact that most small farmers in the third world have animals integrated into their production systems and they occasionally slaughter those animals for meat or they need them for milk. And what are you going to do with the fact that if you look at some of the micronutrients, for example, vitamin B12, these are produced most efficiently by animals. This is actually an efficient way to get certain micronutrients. And what are you going to do about the fact that it's very likely that that because there were lots of animals on earth before the vegan, before the current model of industrial agriculture, that if you got rid of all the animals, different animals would actually fill their ecosystem niche and you would have the same amount of methane spewing out of the atmosphere. You would have carried out this massive disruption of hundreds of millions of people's lives. You wouldn't actually have accomplished anything. Now, This is also linked to venture capitalist proposals for LabMeet, which, of course, these people now want to socialize. They say, well, we can't let the venture capitalists do it. We should do it instead. The question is, why should you do it at all? Why shouldn't you support the developmental ambitions of pastoralists? Which means you would actually have to go out to the Sahel in Mali and say, what do you need? And how can we carry out developmental programs that would help you live a decent life? And these people are like, well, no, we're going to nationalize lab meat in these huge bioreactors made of plastic. Where does plastic come from? Obviously, non-renewable processes. They use this kind of devil's stew of inputs. Where do the inputs come from? Monoculture plantations, again, on third world land. lands in the global south, etc. To understand this actually an integrated process that actually reduces to a kind of primitive accumulation of lands, forests, in the global south in the third world. And this is, you know, been, again, it's been studiously popularized, and you read it again, and again, and again, in the left wing press, I mean, you read it in these kind of little boutique magazines called the logic magazine was defending lab meat, again, And you wonder, OK, if you want to identify yourself as an internationalist, if you care about what people in the third world are actually demanding, they're not demanding that. So why is that your agenda? And for example, there are people, plenty of people in the global north who are also doing sustainable forms of cattle raising. And those people should be encouraged and that should be scaled up. And there's also the question of what is the best way to actually manage the landscape. We don't really know the best way to manage the landscape. That's a tough question. But we do know that the landscape was more or less sustainably managed with 30 to 60 million bison that were historically part of the landscape, especially of the central west of the United States. And that is why that land has a such immense carbon in it. That's why the earth is so black because there's a huge amount of carbon that's been kind of driven into the soil because that's a really healthy ecosystem upon which bison lived. Now, why wouldn't you want to restore that system Instead of thinking, okay, we are going to come up with a new system that we don't really understand. We don't know where the inputs are going to come from. And we don't know if it's going to accomplish what we want it to accomplish. It's what the ruling class wants to do anyway, because it's heavily invested in LabMeet, including Bill Gates is now invested in artificial LabMeet. So... When the left adopts these solutions and thinks, oh, we'll socialize them, what actually happens is, one, you build a divide between the metropolitan left and the third world left, which tends to be much more closely connected to agrarian struggles. You build a divide between a metropolitan left and the indigenous left, which, of course, doesn't embrace these absolutely dunderheaded proposals. So you build up a series of divides and you build a left that, in fact, one is divorced from the actual social subject that could carry out an effective means of resistance. That's the first thing that happens. Overall, you actually confuse any sort of effective resistance to what is the actual that is effective. The current in history, in the world we live, not in another world, not in a parallel universe, not on Mars or not in 300 years. But the actual current program and agenda of the ruling class is to do these things. And you actually confuse and diffuse any actual plausible resistance to it by telling people, oh, well, we can just put a communist flag on red meat. you know, we'll put the hammer and sickle on the lab meat, and it will be leftist lab meat. And so this way of thinking, which is really based on this assumption of the neutrality of technology, the categorical neutrality of technology, I should say, recurs again and again and again and again and again. And so part of what I was really trying to get at in my book is that this is something we should question. We should question what and why and how is happening when a new technology is suddenly being suggested from above.

Rania Khalek: That's a really good point. And also, again, leads into another question I wanted to ask you, which switches it up a little bit from what we've been discussing but is related to what you were just talking about, at least to some degree, with agriculture. You've written about this a lot. What is the agrarian question? And why should leftists like me and most of my audience who are probably urban and may have never seen a farm in their life care about issues that affect peasants And seemingly belong in a bygone era, but obviously don't.

Max Ajl: So in the broadest sense, the agrarian question concerns the set of social and political and economic and ecological questions that are related to agriculture and how agriculture and peasants relate to questions of political mobilizations. to economic development, to gender equality, to the ecological management of our world, to the question of where you get a surplus for industrialization, to the question of who controls the land overall. So these questions of colonialism and anti-colonialism. So it's these sets of questions. I mean, there's a more elaborate and technical answer, which I won't go into, although by all means, I suggest listeners check it out for the aficionados. But these questions have always been fundamental to progressive and radical thinking about the world. They have been very fundamental in the third world, where the population in some countries is still majority peasantry. And if it's not peasantry, they tend to have a more or less direct relationship to some form of rural production. Now, how does this relate to people in the North? I mean, in the first case, When people are supporting an anti-colonial struggle, which I think a lot of your listeners probably do, I think a lot of your listeners probably support the US, the people living in the US, the indigenous people's anti-colonial demands are the same in Canada. And if you have Europeans, maybe some of them will support, be supporting the indigenous peoples of Northern Europe's demands. And of course, many, many of your listeners will support the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. This is an agrarian question too, right? This is about, they better, right? And they should find another program with Matt. Right. So they are already supporting the agrarian question of nation, and they're already thinking about it. They just aren't using those terms, right? They understand that it's important Who controls that land? And they understand that it's important that people and oppressed people should have some form of control over their land and what's grown upon it and what's done on that land. Right. Whether or not everyone has always considered all the ramifications, all the technical aspects and so forth. I think most people understand that that is actually important. They just maybe haven't thought about it in those terms. Right. They do agree. Oh, it is important. that a people is able to control it and not have that decided for them by an outside colonial power, right? So everyone more or less agrees that that is an important aspect of our world. Another thing that people probably consider important is Where does our food come from now? And most people, I think, know that there are or should know if they don't know that not just the world, but also the U.S. are having simultaneous problems of obesity. uh, but also hunger, meaning that people aren't getting enough food. A lot of, uh, also poor people are getting too much food, but the wrong food. And then there is a nutrition problem that is people aren't getting enough good food. And that is a problem that is afflicting and affecting a large portion of the U S population. A lot of the food, uh, not just the poor people eat, but that most people eat is really not good food. Uh, People are interested, I think, in that and view it as an urgent question. Where should our food come from and how can we eat better food that's not going to give us diabetes, that isn't going to give us cancer, that isn't going to give us heart disease? Where can we get healthier food? I mean, of course, this is a huge problem in the third world. And I think your listeners, of course, a lot of them would be interested in this question of the third world. People don't want to be eating at the expense of other people. This is a normal human reaction. If you understand, for example, that your capacity to eat a lot of processed sugar, not that you should be eating processed sugar because it's very bad for you, but that your capacity to eat pineapples or pomegranates or strawberries is really – It means the diversion of cropland in the third world from barley and wheat to export crops. People would be very aghast at that, I think. And so understand that the consumption of food in the north is intimately related to problems of access and consumption of food in the third world, which also and it also it also relates to agrarian who does the labor in even the first world. For example, these are people who've been displaced, for example, from Milpa, from this kind of polyculture of corn, squash, and beans in Mexico that was totally, partially destroyed by NAFTA dumping of corn, frequently genetically modified corn, onto Mexico. This destroyed the... more or less self-subsistent Mexican corn system, and now people are displaced to the United States where they're now the rural proletariat, the rural workers, and they're the ones doing the picking of vegetables and fruit all across the U.S. South, in slaughterhouses for that matter, and also in California. So everything is related, right? These issues are not separate, but the way the world looks to us from externally, we see the issues as separate and walled off from one another, but it's all very connected. I mean, and the The final issue, of course, is that the current methods of farming that are used, even in the north, are causing a lot of damage, right? They cause damage to the soil. And I think probably a lot of people would have seen the floods that ripped across the Midwest two years ago. That is because of low soil quality, and that's because of an overuse of capital-intensive inputs, fertilizers, overuse and poor use of mechanization, overtilling. And this is kind of destroying the soil quality. And so when a huge storm system hits it, it just rips it away and guts it with these valleys and rips it and erodes the soil. Whereas if you have healthy soil that's using a minimum or not at all of inputs that's getting its fertility restored, that's being farmed in an ecologically sound manner, you're going to have lower yields. the yields in the north will go down around 20%, 25%. This is very well established. But it'll be a much more resilient farming system. And if there's a huge storm system, and I actually saw photos of this, where they put photos of land that had been cropped and harvested in an ecologically sustainable manner versus the industrial model, that land more or less was okay. It can absorb a huge amount of water, whereas the land that's farmed using the industrial model model the soil just is ripped away and flows into the river the rivers actually then get clogged they overflow they flood and then you have flooded cities so the problems are all connected to one another one problem creates another problem creates another problem whereas you can actually have solutions that resolve multiple problems simultaneously and head them off before they even happen right so people should in the u.s including should want someone to be taking a good care of the land This is a normal thing that should be encouraged. And if you want a good caretaking of the land, you have to make sure that farmers are being paid, getting a decent living. You need to break up the largest estates, right? Bill Gates should not be the largest landholder.

Rania Khalek: I really don't like him.

Max Ajl: No, he's horrible. He's horrible, right?

Rania Khalek: Actually, evil, yeah.

Max Ajl: He's futile, right? He wants to directly control everything. And so Bill Gates is one of the largest landholders, the largest landholder in the United States. Why shouldn't we have an agrarian reform in the United States? And... Think about how life could be made as good as possible in the countryside, both for the people who are already there and maybe people living in towns who are not small towns, but who are not farmers. But this is ground zero for opioid epidemic because of the destruction of rural life, including amongst, you know, poor white people. And this doesn't have to be the case. This is a social choice that's related to the neglect of rural life. and the underinvestment in rural production and agricultural life by the U.S. government and by the capitalist imperialist food system.

Rania Khalek: So this is a bit of a selfish question related to what you're talking about, because I do live in the Middle East. So, you know, you recently published this article about the agrarian question, specifically in the Arab region, arguing that it's been overlooked by scholars. So can you briefly summarize your argument for our listeners and viewers? And then on top of that, I would ask, and I can remind you of this after you summarize your argument, but is the peasant class still important in the Middle East? And how has Western imperialism affected it?

Max Ajl: For sure. So broadly, although there have been rapid changes in the last few years, when people over the last 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union have written about the Middle East, the overwhelming thing people write about are things like authoritarianism or oil rights. or Islam, or terrorism, or even for the more theoretically elaborate, they write about rentier states, and even some of them might be writing about the working class. There is very little attention to agriculture and to the peasants. And so there are these categories of analysis that basically are received categories of analysis and they're given by US imperialism and often area studies departments that pick up the intellectual agenda as set by US imperialism to focus on things like terrorism, authoritarianism and so forth at the expense of how people are actually living their lives and what they need in order to have a good life in the future and to have their societies be built up in a just and sustainable way. Now, these categories like authoritarianism are not innocent, right? They are framed in a specific way such that authoritarianism is this kind of political category in the Middle East and Arabs in the Middle East have a propensity for authoritarianism and non-democratic constitution of their political systems. On the one hand, the U.S. has always promoted a certain type of authoritarianism, pro-systemic or pro-U.S. authoritarianism. And on the other hand, the U.S.'s most avowed enemies in the region are politically non-democratic governments that in the past carried out extremely radical agrarian reforms, like in Syria, a more or less radical but still important agrarian reform in Egypt, an important agrarian reform in Iraq. So its enemies are not authoritarian or not authoritarian. They often have to do with what the ruling classes did with the land, right? If the ruling classes distributed the land, then they became enemies of the U.S. If they kept monopoly control over the land, for example, in Jordan or in Afghanistan, In Saudi Arabia, where land and rural investments were highly concentrated, or to a lesser extent in Tunisia, they were allies of the United States, right? So this was actually the land is very central for understanding who are the friends and enemies of the United States. And this is an argument I make in the essay. I mean, the other aspect of the argument is that although there are lots of salient agrarian and agricultural issues, that they're the same issues that people in the Arab region face as rural people elsewhere in the world face. They face questions of not enough access to land. They face the question of the state not giving them seasonal loans like short-term loans so that they can buy seeds or so they have money to buy food while they're waiting for their crops to come in. They face questions of the state not investing in agronomic research that could offer them benefits. or they face issues of the state not supporting ecologically sound forms of production overall they face the state biasing investments in favor of massive agribusiness or just giving away land or reclaiming land like they're doing in egypt so that it goes to private capitalist interests and they're facing problems of the state focusing on investments in agro export rather than feeding the population and in consequence people are very hungry For example, in Tunisia, which is producing beautiful pomegranates and strawberries and all sorts of oranges and apricots, people can't afford – poor and lower middle class people can't even afford this stuff. Even though it costs almost nothing in the market, people are eating onions and potatoes because – so much of that other good stuff is being exported. So people are facing these fundamental, typical agrarian questions, but there's another question which is related to war. The primary question that has to be not resolved before the other questions are resolved, but certainly has to be resolved as part of resolving these other questions, is that the U.S. is making a war on the Arab region. What the U.S. has done really since the 70s, if not before, since 1967, is carry out a comprehensive war, a direct military war, channeled through Israel on the Arab region. And it's targeting the states, first of all, that had more or less radical orientations towards their agrarian sector. For example, Syria under the early Ba'ath had a very radical agrarian orientation. It was going to probably radicalize it further. There's a possibility of Egypt further radicalizing its agrarian reform. All of that was put a stop in 1967 with the U.S.-Israeli war on the radical Arab states. Then the U.S. supported the coup against the Iraqi Republican government. in the 60s and then there were a subsequent series of events that basically reduced an constant ongoing war you know really starting from 1980 until the present right i mean we look at what happened to iraq we look at what happened to palestine we look at what happened to lebanon uh then we look at what happened to to yemen starting when the us thought it could really begin to escalate its war against yemen which is another one of the states that carried out a more or less radical agrarian policy for a certain period uh in the in the 1970s So the primary way that the region, the Arab region, is essentially woven into the kind of international system of imperialism and capitalism is through war. And if those wars are not stopped, it's impossible for the region to have a kind of just development of its productive forces, which of course means having… Some form of democracy, meaning popular participation over decision making. And it doesn't just mean voting, right? Of course, everyone wants that for the working people of the region. But if the U.S. is waging war on the region, then it's very hard to carry out, have a democratic system when the U.S. is waging a war on you. It's obvious. So that is the agrarian question. The agrarian question for the region is, first of all, getting the U.S. to stop waging this huge war on the region. Not only once that war stops, but also as part of building up popular power to resist that war. And here we, I think, with the work of someone who's probably not well known to your audience, but it's Adil Samara, who did this work on development by popular protection. You know, he talks about developing a smallholder agriculture as both means and end, as a means to build up and make popular livelihoods better while you're resisting colonialism and imperialism. But then also that becomes a means for, after you've at least partially gotten rid of direct colonialism or direct imperialism, this becomes a means for a popular development process that's based on ensuring, first of all, that the peasants or the small people living on the land, the poor people living on the land, have access to enough land to feed their families. also producing a surplus for people in the cities who can be an industrial working class and build up an industrial capacity, some of which would also be used to build things that people on farms need. So you have a kind of beneficial synergistic spiral of economic development and interactions rather than what you have now, which is just people trying to survive under a continuous war on sanctions.

Rania Khalek: Yeah, I mean, to speak to that, you know, there are those who attribute the Arab uprisings or whatever you want to call them, especially in Syria, to issues like climate change and drought. So I'm curious, what role do you think these factors played on top of, of course, the ongoing sustained decades of war? What factors do you think that issues like climate change and drought played? played in global warming, desertification, as these things get worse, while agricultural policies don't improve, what role do they play in the Arab uprisings? And do you expect these factors to lead to more crises in this region and perhaps other regions?

Max Ajl: So this was very popular analysis, especially in the Syrian case, for quite a while. But there's actually been very careful empirical work by these scholars, Omar Ndahi and Jan Selby, who really went through all the relevant documentation. And Omar is now working on agricultural production statistics from Syria. And what it looks like is that while the drought may have played a certain aggravating role in the situation, damage of people's rural livelihoods, it probably was not a very central factor in population displacement. The population displacement attributed to the drought, actually attributable to the drought, was really not all that high. So this had a lot more to do with the kind of state withdrawal of subsidies, for example, for for fuel oil in 2008 really damaged people's capacity to subsist in the countryside, especially because by that point, there was a widespread need for fuel to power the pumps needed for irrigated agriculture. Now, in terms of the uprisings, I mean, this is a very fraught topic. And of course, there was widespread social degradation in Syria and in other countries of the region. Everybody knows that this is clear to anyone who has read about it or written about it. And there was also widespread discontent with the government policies, which had contributed also, but had been considerably exacerbated by the kind of imperialist push towards neoliberalism in the region and everywhere else that had worsened the government's policies. And the governments were no longer under the same governments that they had been in the 1960s and 1970s. That's true also. Now, So to draw this line of causality between that and what became known as the uprisings is complicated because what is the uprising? It's the uprising Nusra and it's the uprising, you know, the people who are currently ruling over Idlib. It's the uprising, the mercenaries, the hundreds of thousands of mercenaries who, according to most of the statistics, have been sent in from outside the country. Are these part of the uprising? Are these just mercenaries who are probably poor people because that's who is going to volunteer to be mercenaries is poor people? And are they mercenaries who are being paid by the Gulf and probably by the U.S. and who are being armed by the Gulf and the U.S. to go in and destroy the country, which includes Israel? giving weapons and money to people, Syrians themselves, who are poor and feel themselves to be in an antagonism to the government, and are given weapons and said, this is the only way we're going to give you any help to do anything about your government. Why don't you join this band of mercenaries? So, of course, there's an objective structural social aspect that comes from what's going on domestically that is the basis for certain forms of civilian unrest. I think that is very distinct from the actual arming, which is overwhelmingly an artifact of foreign intervention.

Rania Khalek: Right. And also, you know, there is something to be said about, especially in a country like Iraq, for example. I mean, American imperialism before the rise of ISIS, on top of, of course, feeding ISIS because of American policy in Syria, you know, the foot soldiers for ISIS all across Iraq. know they and in syria in many cases came from the countryside um so there is something to be said about u.s policy of war sanctions you know pushing people into cities and of like a lot of the displacement that took place from that but i want to move from that to ask you you know you're talking about the agrarian question and you gave an idea of what could be, are there any successful models in the Global South for dealing with this question, whether it's in China or India or Brazil or anywhere else, even if it's a very small example?

Max Ajl: Sure. I mean, there's historical models and there's current models. The prime historical model, which is universally suppressed, including most of what passes for the North American left, is the Maoist example. I And from 1949 to 1978, increased per capita calorie access from its 1949 to 1978 level. There was a massive increase, but also, for the most part, mounting stability versus the instability of droughts and famines and so forth that had characterized the country in the previous decades. And while also mobilizing a huge, huge, huge surplus for industrialization so that eventually the country was able to industrialize and now it's a superpower. So that was a relatively successful, although not without errors, process of mobilization and social and economic reorganization of the peasantry, fundamentally based on three things. I mean, one... popular peasant mobilization and enthusiasm for the project. Two, completely shattering the feudal rural agrarian structure, leveling it, and freely redistributing the land. And three, labor-intensive agricultural productivity increases, both through the application of things like manure from human, from animals, Green manures, meaning putting plants, plant waste on lands and using all these more, a lot of ecological processes, but also a lot of water and land reclamation, irrigation and land reclamation policies that actually allow China to actually stabilize its agrarian system and find a surplus for industrialization. This was a complete miracle. And this is why it's not discussed, because you don't want other countries also carrying out miracles, right? This would be very dangerous, because then other countries might themselves set in motion this kind of auto-centered development model. And this is what Samir Amin called de-linking. This was very popular in the South. I mean, from 1965, 1967 onwards, all the countries of the South or the radical development economists across the South. We're talking about auto-centered development, self-reliant development. This was experimented with not very successfully in Tanzania. This was the basis in some ways of North Korean developmental policy. This was an ambition for development economists across the Arab region, from Egypt to Tunisia to Syria. They were all talking about auto center development. This was also an ambition in Palestine. So it's clear what you need to do. The question is, where do you get the social power to do it? And how do you do it when the U.S. is going to use Israel to wage a war on you when you start redistributing too much land to your peasantry? That's the fundamental obstacle, right? But there's also contemporary examples, right? And of course, it's all countries that are under a U.S. siege. I mean, there's Cuba. There's Brazil, which was doing something with the landless workers movement, which is still very active and active. It was at least safe, more or less, for most of the landless workers movement to operate under Lula. And the rate of attack on the landless workers movement under Bolsonaro increased massively. There were attempts at agrarian reform under Bolsonaro. Chavez in Venezuela. They very much stalled both because of the imperial siege really stalled the entire process of social radicalization. And they also sent in death squads that murdered all the leading campesino activists in western Venezuela. Those death squads were sent in from the U.S. colony, Colombia, and were killing all the leading activists. Now, So they killed all the leading activists. And then they said, oh, and then you have not just the Western right, but the Western left saying, oh, it seems that the agrarian reform by these chavistas is not very successful. This really is a very corrupt government.

Rania Khalek: And authoritarian. They're so authoritarian. And authoritarian.

Max Ajl: But they're so authoritarian that they don't even have control over their Western border. to prevent assassins coming in that are paid by the U.S. and Colombia to stop the agrarian reform. This is not an authoritarian state. This is actually a very weak state, unfortunately. It would be better for a stronger state. But nevertheless, initially you had important attempts at supporting the peasantry and agrarian reform. You have beautiful things going on in India with zero-budget natural farming, where you have massively increased yields. I mean, it's a miracle. You have doubling, tripling of yields. And you have these agroecological experiments across Latin America, across Africa, where using these kind of ecological processes. using these kind of expansions of the scientific logic and the practical logic of traditional peasant farming systems, they have doubled or tripled yields. Now, if you're a poor peasant and you're used to growing a certain yield and being very poor or even hungry, and you double or triple that yield, This is the difference between being poor and not being poor anymore. You have just had your own revolution, right? This is a miracle, but it's not really discussed as such, especially, unfortunately, it's not discussed or supported enough in the West where it should be an object of considerable support because it's a very simple way to really actually completely transform people's lives. It isn't discussed for a more complicated reason, which is very much related to, I think, what Prabhupada was discussing with you, which is that there's actually a functional use to keep people poor in the third world. If people are poor in the third world, you essentially stabilize capitalism in the first world because you have a constant threat against the wages of people both in the third world and in the first world. That's a different story. But it also means that people who are progressive minded should say, OK, what are these struggles that are happening amongst rural people in the third world to improve their farming systems? Maybe I can support them somehow. And in the long run, or hopefully not too long a run, that actually increases the power of labor of people, of working people in the first world that actually would make our own social struggles domestically stronger.

Rania Khalek: You know, I'm curious, is our current way of life, you know, this kind of migration from the countryside to urban centers, most of us already live in urban centers, overflowing mega cities and monopoly capitalism controlling our food production. I think I know the answer to this, but is that sustainable? And why, if it's not, which I suspect it's not, why is it not sustainable?

Max Ajl: I mean, it's not sustainable because in the first case, it is destroying the biodiversity. And you are having a bird die off, you are having an insect die off, you're having a bee die off, the people regularly read about. These animals, the insects, are the ones who are pollinating all of our plants. So they're actually now bringing bee, traveling bee colonies across the United States in order to assist pollination. And of course, a lot of these bees are dying too. But This is kind of the most basic biological process which allows us to have food to eat is that there's a process of pollination going on that leads to us having crops. Now, if that process breaks down, we don't really know what we're going to do. That's one example. Another example is that if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase considerably further, you can't grow crops anymore. Already, the tropical zone is at its limit in some ways for cereal cultivation. And also, the summers in the Midwest in the United States are scorchingly hot. Now, people are like, okay, well, the cereal belt will just move north. But the soil in Canada is underlain by... considerably thick layer of rock it's not the same type of geological formation as we have in the midwest you can't grow soil you can't grow cereals in the same way in canada as you can grow them in the u.s and what about mexico and its corn where is it going to go right so you have this crisis you have a crisis that uh the the genetic diversity for crops is primarily in the third world. Potatoes in the Andes, corn in Mexico, for example. And those are also regions that are more vulnerable to the destructive impacts of climate change. If climate change rips apart social and ecological systems that are the reservoirs for genetic diversity, and then you have populations corn blight, like an infection in the cereal crop in the north, normally you would go to the south to get the appropriate genetic diversity in order to rebuild your genetic seed stock for corn. If that has been eliminated, What are you going to do? You're going to genetically engineer a new type of climate resilient corn? I mean, when nature, in fact, and human intervention in nature, but in a kind of thoughtful way, has itself been the traditional way of doing that, you're going to do that and go and do that in a laboratory. It's a very bad idea, right? It's a very dangerous proposition. And it's a way of kind of betting on relentless, high-tech ingenuity to resolve ever-worsening problems. Now, the solution, in my opinion, for this is, of course, you know, get to zero emissions, have a worldwide agrarian reform and stop doing a U.S. imperialism and carry a payout climate debt. And then you can have a hope for everybody in the planet to have a decent life.

Rania Khalek: That's well said. You know, I'm curious, Max, and I promise you I'm getting towards the end here because you've given me a lot of your time, which I really appreciate. But I notice, you know, in your book and in a lot of your work, you often cite or mention Samir Amin, the late Egyptian French Marxist. So I'm curious, what is the importance of Samir Amin to you and shaping your views?

Max Ajl: So Samir Amin is fundamental. I mean, I think like Paris Yeros put it best, like, thank you to Samir Amin for teaching us how to think. Samir Amin basically, now it's a small exaggeration, of course, but we still thank Samir Amin for teaching us how to think. Samir Amin extended Marxism to the third world in many ways. in a way that has some parallels with what Utsa and Prabhupada are doing, but on a more global scale. So he showed us how accumulation on a world scale is a global process. He showed us the details of it. He showed the role of the periphery in maintaining the stability of capitalism. He showed us the importance of how slavery was intimately tied to the de-development of Africa and how this was intimately tied in turn to, uh, U S industrialization. He showed us, um, he showed us the reliance of, uh, the U S and Europe on, uh, monocrops from the third world and especially Africa and their relationship to, uh, soil degradation and overall degradation of, uh, livelihoods. He showed us how unequal exchange works. That is how the North, uh, rips value from the South through the actual process of supposedly equal trade. He showed us the importance of China as a sovereign developmental model. He popularized this idea that third world countries could de-link as a way to carry out a developmental process. He showed us the importance of the national question and how the national question was necessary for organizing our thinking towards defending the process of popular development in the periphery, which would then allow for an eventual popular development in the core so long it was occurring in concert with strong movements in the periphery. So he did all these things and he was relentless in his intellectual production. In fact, I have a book of his in front of me on the table right now. And so this importance is just fundamental. I mean, anyone who wants to understand how the world came to be over the last 60 years should go read Samir Amin.

Rania Khalek: Well said. And then, you know, I have like just a couple more questions for you and you can be as lengthy or as brief as you want. But I wanted to ask you to address very quickly something that I've seen being used more and more against the global south. And you kind of mentioned it a little bit before this issue of attacking left wing countries in the global south for so-called extractivism. This has been used against Bolivia. It's been used against, you know, Venezuela. I think, sadly, Naomi Klein, I think, called, what did she call Venezuela? It was something like petropopulism. But I'm curious if you can address this increasingly common criticism among a certain segment of the left in the global north against these global south countries that do attempt to nationalize their resources and use them to fund national programs. This issue of extractivism and basically using the idea of pollution and climate change against these countries that have been destroyed by imperialism.

Max Ajl: Of course. So it's a very problematic idea. I mean, it really emerged in force and got very much popularized in the global north when the Latin American populist government started to reassert national resource sovereignty. This should tell us a lot about the concept just on its face. It also does emerge from contradictions within third world development. But these contradictions are not new. I mean, one of the contradictions is reliance on primary commodities exports, for example, especially minerals, although extractivism is now also applied to agriculture. This is not new. I mean, this is the fundamental position of the third world in the International Division of Labor. Going back to colonial times, I mean, Bolivia was a major silver exporter, and that was an extractivism that drained a lot of wealth from Bolivia. to Spain, for example. So this idea of resource extraction, and the unfortunate special specialization of the third world and resource extraction is not new. What is new is trying to turn it into what they call a concept. Now the concept is very problematic because precisely because not only is it not new, but you don't have industrialization without extraction, you have to take resources from the earth, dead resources like oil, like silver, like metal. You have to take resources and then transform them in order to carry out a developmental process. Now, the question is, what are the environmental costs of that? Who suffers the environmental costs and who receives the benefits? Now, this was raised in a serious way as opposed to the current unserious way by governments in the 1960s, 70s and 80s through the arguments over the new international economic order and through the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development. What they said is the problem is the terms of trade. We need more money. for our natural resources. And if you give us enough money, then we'll be able to develop. And if they're developed enough, then the US can do an extractivism and they don't have to do an extractivism, right? So the extractivism discourse ultimately largely reduces to blaming these countries for their own historical underdevelopment at the hands of US capitalism. Now, there is, of course, a serious issue of the environmental consequences of mineral extraction. But where is the blame for those? Of course, we would prefer, I would prefer these countries have radical agrarian reforms and carry out systems of agroecology in their farming systems and carry out programs of appropriate scale industrialization and also receive climate debt. I would prefer those things. But I don't have a program to help them do those things. The limit of a program that people can do to help them do those things in the global north is to prevent the U.S. from invading those countries and carrying out malfeasance in those countries and carrying out coup d'etat in those countries and imposing neoliberal constraints on those countries. And, you know, one could even demand the U.S. offers better terms of trade for those countries. If you want... If you want Bolivia to not extract so much oil and so much gas, then why not triple the price you give Bolivia for gas? But that demand doesn't emerge in the extractivist discourse, right? Because it's considered unrealistic. But what is realistic is wishing for a socialism from nowhere for a country like Bolivia. And if you look at the extractivist discourse, they themselves have no serious developmental programs for the third world. Um, they, they call for a post extractivism or the gradual investment of the oil wealth in the countryside or in national development and permanently sustainable development. Of course, I support all those things. In fact, I studied them and know quite a lot about, uh, like I was talking about agroecology and appropriate scale industrialization and so forth, but you need a social struggle. to do that. And that social struggle needs to not worry about being decapitated by the United States. And in fact, the extractivism discourse, uh, ends up with people lending support to United States attempts at decapitation. I don't want to say all the extractivist people are on board with the U S coup, but a very large number, for example, uh, have either been in soft or hard support of the coup in Bolivia, um, and were in support of the US supported candidate in Ecuador, and have basically marginalized US solidarity with the ongoing revolutionary process in Venezuela, where there's also accusations of extractivism. So it ends up being a way of eliminating any sort of solidarity and sympathy for people in those countries who also want to go beyond a resource centered model of economic development but in fact face a question of the political organization and constitution of social power that itself is being obstructed in large measure by the power of the United States.

Rania Khalek: Well said. And I guess I'd want to end on this note. I think that the overall theme here is that imperialism is probably the biggest, if not the biggest obstacle to fixing or mitigating the worst impacts of this climate catastrophe that we have on our hands. And so whose lead should we be following? You talk in your book, I mean, there are groups in the Global South that have laid out programs for how to deal with this. They just don't get any airtime, I guess, in the Global North. But can you talk a little bit about that? And that's a good note to end on is whose lead should we be following on this issue?

Max Ajl: Yeah, so every time that there's a massive climate meeting, there are actually demands coming from the global south for more or less just international climate accords. Those demands are suppressed. They continue to demand the repayment of climate debt. They continue to try to stop U.S. green imperialism. When there's a climate conference, we should be supporting and elevating the demands for climate debt, for example. These governments are, of course, still agitating for climate debt on the world stage. But all we need to do is say we demand climate debt payments to the third world. We demand demilitarization of our countries and the use of those resources to pay climate debt to the third world. In terms of resources, I very much recommend that people go to Google. Unfortunately, Google. Use GoGo or whatever, Duck. And type in the Cochabamba People's Agreement and read it. And that is a great document that had a widespread legitimacy within Latin America and still is a reference document. Read it. And if you are doing local climate action, think about how your local demands interact with and support those demands coming from the global south. So start with that. start with learning what the demands are, and then thinking about how your local action can support those demands, including, say, if you have a local legislator or a local mayor, or you are represented by one of these Democratic progressives in Congress, say, I want my Democratic progressive candidate to talk about climate debt and demand climate debt payments in Congress. These are what we can do. I mean, if I had better examples about what what to do, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to, I would be organizing a revolution. But I think these are some good steps.

Rania Khalek: Well said. Max, thank you so much for joining me for an hour and a half to talk about this extremely important issue. People can, should go, where can they find your book? I guess, A People's Green New Deal, published by Pluto Press. Where is the best place for people to go find your book and where can they follow your work?

Max Ajl: They should check it on bookshop.com or .org or directly from the publisher, Pluto Press. And they can follow me on Twitter with my name, M-A-X-A-J-L. And I'm very active there.

Rania Khalek: Which I'm pretty sure, did I just mispronounce your name again? I do this all the time.

Max Ajl: I didn't know this.

Rania Khalek: Okay, good, good, good. Well, now everyone can know that I mispronounce your name sometimes. I'm allowed to, though. I get like a pass because I have a name people mispronounce a lot. So I feel like I'm allowed to mispronounce other people's names.

Max Ajl: Yeah, yeah. It's a frequent occurrence. So it's quite okay.

Rania Khalek: Well, thank you so much for joining me on Breakthrough News.

Max Ajl: Great. Thank you so much.