Theories of Political Ecology with Max Ajl

Jay: Welcome to Millennials are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this episode, Max Isle returns to the podcast. Max Isle is an educator and a researcher and the author of A People's Green New Deal, which we highly recommend and previously discussed with him back in 2021. He is also the associate editor of Agrarian South, Journal of Political Economy. We caught up with Max back in early August to talk about one of his recent pieces from Agrarian South. The article is entitled, Theories of Political Ecology, Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet. It's a very interesting article that covers a range of ostensibly left-wing approaches to ecology and the ecological crisis through a critical lens. Recording this conversation in the middle of summer, the climate was certainly on our mind. There were a number of events and conversations we referenced that folks will likely recall from early August. This will be a two-part release. In the first portion, we talk about the theory of ecologically unequal exchange, which Max uses throughout the piece. We discuss wheat and cereal grains as weapons of imperialism. Bananas and Fresh Fruits in the First World, and get into some of Isle's critiques of different strains of political ecology. In particular, in this episode, Max talks about Andreas Malm's formulation of fossil capitalism and also critically engages with the frameworks of eco-modernism and extractivism. Throughout, Aisle challenges Eurocentric and First World nationalist variants of Marxism that dominate much of the First World Marxist engagement with ecological questions, raising the importance of bringing anti-imperialist analysis, a world-system-level understanding of capitalism, and solidarity with national liberation movements into Marxist theorizations around the ecological question and the practice of ecological and anti-imperialist movements today. We will link the article we discuss in the show notes, as well as some of the articles Max mentions in the discussion. In part two of this conversation, which will be out in the coming days, we will talk a little bit more about eco-modernism and get into some discussion of degrowth as well. This is our first episode of the month of October. We thankfully hit our goal of new patrons for the last month and have set our goal once again to add 40 new patrons this month to keep up with non-renewals and hopefully slowly increase our base of support for the show. Thanks to everyone who contributes. It is both appreciated and needed. You can become a patron of the show for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com slash millennials are killing capitalism. All right, Max Isle, welcome back to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. To start, I think we should kind of situate this conversation similarly to how you lay out your introduction in the piece we're discussing today. You discuss in the introduction broadly what political ecology is as a field of study. what some of the key areas of inquiry or subfields within that are, and you discuss why it is important to offer a critique of this body of inquiry or research. You also talk about why it is important for you to offer this critique at this point in time. Some of the current you know, important trends or issues in this time period, which you think make a critique, you know, a necessity at this point. So if you can situate this piece within this context that you kind of lay out in the introduction.

Max Ajl: Great. Thanks for this question. So the debate about the environmental question and within the progressive spaces and within progressive or Marxist or leftist discourse and as it interacts with the mainstream discourse and furthermore, of course, the debate about the origins of capitalism and its structural dynamics go back a very long time. What one might call the modern environmental debate on an international scale actually goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, before these modern academic fields started to crystallize and solidify in reaction to this international debate and its own consolidation. So the idea that humanity in its distinct social formations was having negative impacts on the non-human environment, which would then go back to impact human life, is of course nothing new in human thought, right? It's manifest and it was... thought about abstractly and its causes were identified with a great variety of ways and great variety of resolutions have historically been proposed. What was a bit novel starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s is that the question of the objective limits of a growth-based system of production and consumption, and I say that instead of saying capitalism very deliberately, started to be posed on an international scale with discussion about limits to growth. And the reaction across the South immediately understood this discussion in the specific form in which it was unfurling within Northern circles as basically an attack on the right to development. that if growth was frozen in the South, then this was de facto a freeze on the capacity of the South to develop and provide good lives to its citizens. And furthermore, it was clearly identified that the North was the originary source of the systemic environmental problems on a world scale. Now, I take this slight detour before responding directly to your question to clarify, first of all, that the North and South have historically had very different perspectives on the environmental question and that The South never denied ever the importance of the environmental question, particularly, for example, when its people were, for example, suffering in slums due to polluted drinking water, which was very much linked to an inadequate level of development, right? An inadequate level of sanitation services, or it was suffering from the offshoring of polluting industries increasingly from the North, which was a systemic process that started in the late 1960s. So there was never a denial of it, but there was also a constant awareness that discussion of that question had to be framed, ensconced in a discussion of the overarching question, which was the right to development, which was in turn really an outgrowth of the national and national liberation movements themselves, and the rights they asserted for themselves on the world stage in a kind of sequence going from Bandung to the non-aligned movement to the UNCTAD conference in 1964, which was primarily concerned about terms of trade. It's also when, as Latin America began to be much more fully enfolded into this front of the third world, which in the original discussions, of course, of Bantang obviously did not include Latin America, which had been settler decolonized long before. So... It's important to reframe the conversation and to kind of try to remove it from what is, in essence, very often a kind of northern scholastic bickering, which is actually... separated from developmental questions, national questions, and movement questions, including the movement questions of the environmental movements of the North, right? And so this essay was kind of trying to say, okay, these debates about political ecology, and that is the interaction of human with environment, you know, are very important. they congealed as an academic field, particularly in the north in the mid to late 1980s, early 1990s, although there are critical ecological interventions, for example, coming from Amicar Cabral much earlier, related in particular to things like soil erosion, which was also, of course, commented on by Figures like Walter Rodney and Samir Amin as they encounter the problems of monocrop cultivation in West Africa, right? But we needed to reground the debate in what are the needs of people on a world scale and how can the debate be grounded in a discussion that is at least, that is kind of a theoretical scaffolding for imagining world developmental convergence towards kind of an egalitarian communist world that has a rational interchange, a rational metabolism, a rational regulation of its interaction with non-human nature.

Jay: Right on. Thank you for that introduction. So a lot of this essay is kind of like, you know, critiquing some of these different trends in this field of political ecology, specifically aspects of it that, you know, you think are imperialist or yeah, I mean, just just critiquing elements of it that you think need to be critiqued right within it. One of the areas that you still offer critique of when you get to it, but you kind of lay out in the introduction that you're looking to rework or think there's a lot of utility in is this idea of ecologically unequal exchange. And you write about how you rework this theory. So could you, in addition to sharing kind of what ecologically unequal exchange is, could Say a bit about how you look to kind of rework that and what alterations you offer to that theory.

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So ecologically unequal exchange is referring, for the most part, to a set of empirically... well-documented phenomena within the world system. So to take one example, environmentally unequal exchange will refer to the fact that tonnage, for example, of goods exported from the South at any stage of processing is much higher than the tonnage exported from the north in exchange for those goods. Or it will point out that through the process of international trade, pollution is in effect exported to the south, including China in the south for purposes of this discussion. So that, for example, the offshoring and the industrialization of China is occurring alongside what is effectively an import, not only an import of manufactured goods from China by the North, but a rise in particulate matter over the skies in China, leading to pollution and also leading to negative healthcare outcomes for Chinese citizens. And so this is built into the structure of world trade at the current moment. Or the fact that, again, the North is consuming a disproportionate share of wood products on a world scale. And that if you calculate this on a world scale, you find that in aggregate, the North is using a much higher portion of, say, acreage per person person than people in the south which is something a bit commonsensical i think but uh it shows the trade patterns through which this occurs which also means that it's showing it's linked to the the pricing patterns through which this trade occurs that is the pricing patterns which pattern trade, that if a northern export is very expensive, for example, compared to a southern export, it can buy more of the southern export. And if a certain amount of materials, which also means a certain amount of land use, is effectively congealed in a commodity export or a manufactured export from the south versus the north, then the price system kind of is the metabolism that regulates and ensures those continued inequalities, we can say, in the flows. Now, this has been often very helpful. The first point to make is to clarify is that this question of what is effectively what we can call an unequal exchange, right, goes back to the late 1940s. It itself is not new. The proposition that certain, the poorer portions of the world were suffering from an unevenness in what was called the terms of trade. That is, their exports were not only at a disadvantage as compared to northern exports, which we can think of classically, although not correctly, as a question of kind of raw or unprocessed commodities versus manufactured goods, but that those terms of trade were deteriorating. That is, if one bushel of coffee traded for a half a car, and this is a wrong number, but let us just use the example of one bushel of coffee traded for half a car in 1950, It would take 10 bushels of coffee to trade for half a car in 1960, speaking very roughly. If we think in those terms, it's clear that because the equivalence is established in price terms, that the price terms then become a mechanism. for ever increasing use of resources and furthermore amounting disproportion of access to not only resources, but in essence, the land and the productive labor of the land by the North vis-a-vis the South, right? This is in very rough times. Now, there are important insights in both the original unequal exchange and the subsequent evolution of it to ecologically unequal exchange literature, right? There's a fundamental problem in the original literature, some of which has been carried forward into the subsequent literature. In the original literature, it was, first of all, not sufficiently clear or linked to internal class dynamics, right? And this is because the original literature was the fruit of kind of heterodox left-wing economists, in particular, in this case, Raoul Prebysch, who was not a revolutionary and was not advocating a radical change in class structures, was not grounded in Marxism. and did not offer a theory that was capable of linking the depressed prices for the primary exports to the class structures of the South and the class structures of the North. I mean, he offered some insights into this, but it wasn't systematically articulated. And it certainly was not systematically articulated in Marx's term that would clarify the worldwide class basis of this process. That was one problem. The second smaller problem is that the question of the declining terms of trade did not apply to all products. And in particular, there were certain commodities it did not apply to. In particular, it didn't apply to commodities the North produced, which is one way of stating that One thing that was not sufficiently appreciated in the early debates is that the inequalities were not the fruit of the physical trade itself or the physical nature of the products. which would be a form of substantialism and of thinking that these kind of immutable properties exist in the objects that then determine the social relations, but rather the issue then and the issue now is that the social relations determine how these commodities enter international trade and what their values are, right? Now, why is that important? That's important, first of all, because it allows us to keep in mind, for example, that something like wheat, which is something that the U.S. is a dominant exporter of, right, historically, has actually been a weapon against the South. Like wheat exports are a weapon against the South. So historically, starting from the 1950s, which is another topic, which I'm not sure we'll have time to go into. But if you just look at wheat as tonnage, right, then you would think, how would this fit into the theory of ecologically unequal exchange? That's one thing. Another thing is that once we bring class into it, we're able to think much more about mechanisms of the reproduction of ecologically unequal exchange. And third, we're able to think much more about resolutions towards ecologically unequal exchange. Now, this probably we're getting ahead of ourselves and we're going to get into it. But one effective resolution shared by a lot of scholars who kind of accept the theory of ecologically unequal exchange is that, okay, well, the South should seize commodity exports like exports of oil, like exports of coal, right? Now, This may have a superficial appeal because most people are aware that the process of mineral extraction from the earth's rim can be very damaging towards communities. Now, of course, there's no question that that is certainly true and is a question of either how to reduce the impact or how to compensate affected communities, or a nation state can indeed make the decision that it is no longer interested in paying that ecological price on a national scale. Those are sovereign national decisions that need to be made on the basis of internal democratic process within sovereign national entities, preferably controlled by the working class or working class political force, of course. And those require an assessment of the costs and balances of a certain quantity and a certain annual intensity of resource extraction. So the very fact that mineral extraction is damaging and is unequally damaging North and South does not sufficiently tell us what to do about it. It just identifies certain patterns of world trade and their effects. China, for example, which has in fact suffered a great deal from the pollution of both its own export-oriented industrialization and the offshoring of industrial production from various countries to China, has actually used that process of export-oriented industrialization to vastly climb the value chain and vastly reduce ramp up its technological capacities. And now is basically the world's leading producer of alternative energy, right?

Jay: Of renewable energy, especially this is the case for solar installations.

Max Ajl: Putting China in a very strategic position, for example, to help carry out a green ecological and we'll see in terms of the egalitarian aspects, transformation of the world system. Now, again, this requires no particular position about China to understand that the export-oriented industrialization strategy on its own terms led to ecological damage, but now situates China to be in a position where it can actually be an ecological lifeboat, speaking here on the technological and logistical levels on a world scale. So again, the theory is very important. The theory of ecologically unequal exchange is very important, but it must be embedded in our own understandings of the world system. We can't forego those theorizations and rely on this analysis of trade flows to do the work for us, right? This would not help us understand in a deep way the world system. It also requires us to do the work of understanding, for example, what are the class effects of this uneven reproduction, this uneven reproduction through trade, this uneven impact of ecological destruction? What are the local and international impacts and how do they work with one another? And then we can understand better, for example, that there could be situations where lower class people in not just China, but also, say, Bangladesh and Philippines are suffering intensively from the conversion into export platforms from the south to the north, these kind of teleconnected pollution and trade patterns that are built into the world system, that it's the working classes who suffer those countries. And this is why the trade takes the particular form it does. But this is also why, for example, in countries like the Philippines or Bangladesh, you have an upper class that is very interested in maintaining the continuity of these specific patterns, both of resource extraction and industrialization. That is, again, that we need to understand the class basis for the maintenance of these these policies, if we want to understand what an appropriate strategy would be to resist them, right? And so this allows us to rebuild the theory, but also to understand how the theory can build a class-based practice of ecological internationalism.

Jay: So I kind of want to ask a follow up because you did mention wheat and, you know, we don't have to get deeply into this, but I'm because obviously would derail the whole conversation to some degree. But I am, you know, you mentioned it being a weapon from the global north and from the United States and Western countries. societies. And, you know, there is the whole situation right now where obviously with the war between Ukraine and Russia, And then there was just this past week, you know, an Africa-Russia summit. And this was a big topic. And, you know, Russia had, I guess, backed out of an agreement that included working with Ukraine around grain. From my understanding, I don't have a deep understanding of this. And this was portrayed a very particular way in the West as, you know, Russia using grain or wheat as a weapon, right, against Africa. And that's not necessarily, I don't think, entirely how it was received, you know, within Africa. But I really am wondering if you have any thoughts on this situation or kind of just what's at stake with this situation.

Max Ajl: Right. So... I mean, Russia is, in the current period, is a massive exporter of cereals. And for historical reasons, Africa is a net cereal importer. Very much, of course, the heritage of the colonial patterns of commodity export specialization, and then that it was entrenched in by the violence of European colonialism. And then the broadly neocolonial transition that maintained those patterns alongside de-emphasis on national self-sufficiency in grain production using homegrown genetic stock, an improvement of homegrown genetic stock and genetic variety of the various cereals available to African nations. And of course, very concretely, the U.S. was involved, and especially and penitently in North Africa, in entrenching third world cereal and especially wheat dependents through the PL480 program, which sent out subsidized cereals as grants and to some extent as loans from the United States to the North African countries, which is a major source of their income. current serial dependents, and I think also a major reason that the North African countries were able to avoid land to the tiller agrarian reform. Now, It's well established, and it was actually a central theme in kind of third world developmental theory, planning, and public discourse in the 70s and 80s, what the US was doing. Everyone knew about it, right? There was like books about food as a weapon and so forth. It was well established amongst the politically conscious sectors of the population on a wide scale. Now, Of course, you know, the U.S. is prone to accuse everything Russia does as a question of seeking influence and seeking power and a new imperialism and so forth. Now, it's funny, this goes back to at least to Bandung, when the U.S. and France were eagerly promoting the idea that that Russia's policies, the Soviet policies and its sphere of influence were tantamount to a process of imperialism and neocolonialism. And of course, we see it in the contemporary period, both on the right where it is expected and on the left where some find it unexpected, although I think this is a misunderstanding of the structural nature of the first world left. and its cultural institutions, that you find a promotion of the idea of Russian and Chinese neocolonialism and imperialism, including in Africa, right? So it's very predictable. Now, most of the African nations, their leadership, substantial portions of their communist parties, for that matter, do not see the Russian actions in Africa, or the Chinese actions for that matter, as a rehearsal of neocolonialism and imperialism in their regions of the world. And the opening up of channels for grain, for example, in a context when the U.S. is militantly militantly using its control over strategic nexuses of world trade and world financial relations, for example, through SWIFT and otherwise as weapons against the development of the South. This is the context against which the African nations interpret the use or the openness of Russia to export its excess grain through these discussions. Now, it seems to me that more or less it was designed to some extent as a propagandistic. It was also meant to kind of remedy the question of the impact of the rise in global food prices through the Russia Ukraine crisis. It was also meant to remedy the withdrawal from the agreement to allow Ukraine to export grain. And so it was meant to kind of sign a number of bilateral agreements that would provide a certain amount of grain to the countries of Africa that were both ones that were in need of grain. And also it's been reported, for example, that Russia is exporting some grain to Zimbabwe, which is actually not in need of grain this year. So I think it's more about solidifying the Russian relationships on the African continent, more on the basis of equality than the basis of neocolonial attack. And I think this is more the basis of further relationships than there have been major agreements themselves that are coming out of it.

Speaker 3: Definitely. So at the start of the section on fossil capitalism, you trace a lineage of a certain Marxism that in the face of Lenin and Luxembourg, work on imperialism and the Marxist thought emanating from national liberation movements, and I'm quoting here, resisted these interventions, suppressing the role of primitive accumulation while building a historical interpretation of capitalism with origins essentially in domestic British class structures. And So what are some of the ways in which fossil capitalism sidesteps issues of imperialism and national determination from the Global South? And what are the key implications of this understanding?

Max Ajl: So that's a super important question. So what's been very central, what was central in the intervention of fossil capitalism by Andreas Milm, who has catapulted himself to some kind of importance in talking about the use of violence in the ecological movement, was basically to state that the process of the transition from water to coal in the British countryside was a hinge moment within the world system, and that it was primarily, it was very much linked to both the need to control workers, to concentrate them in cities and other places where they would be subject to the control of their bosses, and that it was also linked to the kind of hierarchical nature of coal distribution itself, which could be kind of easily transported around and pushed into industrial facilities, as opposed to water power, which was cheaper at a but required a great deal of cooperation and coordination in order to leverage it into energy use. Now, the first thing that's very important to point out, is and this is something that jason moore has raised is that the whole capacity to make cotton kind of the lever of the industrial revolution depended on a reduction of the price of the raw material cotton on a world scale right and this in turn was, first of all, intimately linked, of course, to the slave trade, right? The fall of the price of cotton, because you have a cheaper input and made large-scale industry possible. The cotton was cultivated by stolen African slaves, and it was also cultivated on stolen land. And This is so apparent, historically speaking. It's so obvious that it's, of course, indisputable. And you can be sure that no one who believes in fossil capitalism would actually dispute it. But suddenly, and this is what Marx classically called primitive accumulation, right? And Marx would never denied for a second in his volume one, that these were essential constitutive elements of the process of the development of industrial capitalism. What he also said is that volume one of capital is volume one of an unfinished work, and it's meant to deal with basically the development of social relations and the development of capitalism. in England itself, and that the kind of bracketing of England, for the most part, geographically, spatially, and in terms of its social relations, was a methodological choice in order to highlight certain dynamics, and that other dynamics, for example, international trade, would be dealt with in later portions, later volumes of capital. So capital was an unfinished project. That's fine. And it's also both fine and to be expected that a dude like Marx, who was living in England, would start his theoretical masterwork with a focus on the forms of oppression and the social relations that were the most present in his immediate sphere. This is normal, right? And in fact, it's what most Marxists have done throughout history, right? And that's why Marxism takes on different faces when it moves from north to south, right? Because the immediate issues that people face are very different, right? Now, Marx was pretty clear. It's silly, I think, to say that Marx had a finished project. And it's also wrongheaded to say that we have no obligation to develop that project to make it more universalistic in nature. That is, universalistic by attending to the particular in all places of the world. Now, the problem with the fossil literature is that although it nodded to the fact that primitive accumulation was absolutely central to the development of the shift in energy uses on a world scale. it kind of nodded to that and then focuses only on social relations in England, right? Which were of course linked to the enclosures, the dispossession of the peasantry, linked to competitive land leases in the countryside, linked to the concentration of the population in urban slums, therefore providing the human material for, uh, process of, uh, concentration of large-scale industry, which also was the basis for this conversion of the whole-scale energy systems of England from organic power linked to water to the fossil fuel power embodied in coal. Now, once you've accomplished all of these methodological maneuvers, you end up focusing on the North at the expense of the South. You say that the agents of history are in the North, right? The industrial working class. You also end up focusing, and I didn't write that much about this because I found it quite intolerable at a certain point to sift through it, but you end up focusing on the subjectivity of northern workers and how they have had their subjectivity constructed by the cheap energy available to them in the form of coal, now oil, and its products, and how this makes mass action difficult on a world scale, right? Now, so these are a series of methodological choices that not only end up leaving most of the world out of your social history, your economic history of capitalism, but also serve to kind of shear off any question of who are the core agents of transformation in the world system. Right. Now, Malm is, of course, a British Trotskyite, and you can't expect very much from these people. The world Trotskyite movement has very little to show for it on a world scale other than selling one another books. It's a very important aspect for university presses, but it's not a very necessarily the key thing for changing the world. So, you know, one shouldn't invest too much hope in a figure like Mao, but the problem is that this notion of fossil capitalism has ended up kind of unthinkingly deployed on a world scale. Now, on the one hand, we can discuss whether all these appellations of capitalism are necessarily helpful for understanding capitalism. I think there's some are that some are not. I think fossil capitalism, the formulation I used when I was a younger scholar, I think it's not helpful at all because the suggestion which Malm ends up making explicitly in some of his later work is that you need a united front, a movement of movements in order, these are his words, in order to defend the conditions of reproduction, that is a certain amount of safe atmospheric space the condition of reproduction for humanity as a whole. So the implication, again, is that humanity should enlist in common cause to stop this emissions of CO2, right? What this then does is, first of all, it omits the question of a differentiated north-south responsibility, right, for transition. And what ends up happening is that so first of all the question of the obligations the north owes to the south gets removed from the agenda now it's one thing if that's removed from the agenda of capitalists okay they're the enemy but what actually someone reading this stuff and imbibing it and understanding it as a source of theoretical strength for their own political practice, will end up saying, oh, well, we also don't need to focus on other northern obligations here, speaking like geographically and socially from other northern obligations to the south, for example, this question of trying to force governments to pay climate reparations from the North to the South, which is a live political demand coming from Southern nations. But it's suppressed once you say, oh, there's a common cause of stopping fossil fuel production and consumption. It also sidesteps this question of sovereign national development, right? I mean, sovereign national states in the third world are aware that they're dealing with the consequences of global warming. I mean, look at Iran and Tunisia this summer, right? Iran is seeing 33 Celsius, you know, which is 85, 90 degree nights. Now we're not talking days, but nights, right? So, The damage is increasingly incalculable for these countries that are the historic victims. But their process of national development is kind of like it has nothing to do now in the coming period with this Barak consumption of fossil capitalism. That's nothing to do with it. I mean, Iran needs the U.S. to lift its sanctions. which are severely harming national development efforts, including access to technology. Same for Zimbabwe, which needs the sanctions lifted so that it can adequately trade with the world system in order to further develop its productive forces, which might mean more per capita emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere for a certain period, precisely because there isn't a lot of other option for these countries at the current period. I mean, is our Palestine, our Yemen, our Syria, are these countries enmeshed in this question? Is there problematic, both developmentally and ecologically, a question of fossil capital? I mean, is fossil capital theorizing the world system in an adequate way that can account for the developmental needs and the political struggles of these nations? I mean, so the question is kind of, it's very rhetorical because it's false on its face. So the notion is meant to be universalizing and encompassing, right? It's meant to be a theorization of the world ecological system. But what it actually reflects is the very parochial needs, interests of a set of Northern leftists who are worried about global warming just in their own societies for their own children and are not paying attention to the particular needs that come from the South, which often might have to do with simply resisting an external militarized attack on their societies and their levels of social reproduction. So it's been a way of kind of saying it's been very useful for separating the ecological movement from the broader movement of the South, where national liberation is still the order of the day, in my opinion.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I appreciate that breakdown, truly. And kind of like, I just want you to elaborate a little bit on how that has required a retooling of historical materialism and Marxism, if you can. Like, what does this look like and how has this happened in your estimation?

Max Ajl: Yeah, so this is critical, and I think we see a lot of successors to Malm operating. Now, Malm himself had some awareness of the polarized nature of the world system, but he never incorporated it into his notion of fossil capitalism. So basically, and in contrast to what Marx wrote so clearly in capita, right? Marx wrote so clearly that primitive accumulation was absolutely central and constitutive to our world system. This new range of both scholarship, which also in our current moment really does a large portion of setting the pace of activists' thought and practice, what it ends up doing is that it pushes people to suppress this question of primitive accumulation, which is still ongoing, of north-south antagonism, which is ongoing, and kind of it leads to an embrace of these notions of a flat capitalism, which are very much in vogue. For example, you can find Vivek Chhibber babbling about this kind of flat capitalism, that capitalists exploit workers. These are the dynamics of capitalism on a world scale. There's a process of fundamental antagonism between workers and capitalists. Therefore, you can find workers and capitalists in Bangladesh. You can find workers and capitalists, for that matter, in China. You can find them in Philippines. Therefore, the task of workers is to oppose capitalists, right? And you can even draw maps of industrial relations in each of these societies that are sheared off from international value flows. essentially, and the international dynamics of polarized accumulation, and also the international dynamics of the national liberation movements and attempts at socialist construction, that basically are all these analysis end up looking pretty narrowly at national societies don't look very closely at the political choices, compromises made by forces internal to those societies, because they're in a subservient position within the world system. Or on the other hand, how these political forces that are pro-US, pro-systemic, pro-EU have often been installed by the EU and the US in order, or before that, by earlier European states in the neocolonial, colonial to neocolonial transition that have very much played a role in installing these kind of pro-systemic dynamics that set the pace, that set the background, that set the atmosphere, uh, set the terrain for these kind of capitalist worker conflicts within these countries. So in essence, all of this work has no theory of imperialism, to put it in a sense. Fossil capitalism against what Marx was elaborating with respect to primitive accumulation, which was, while not a theory of imperialism, certainly elaborated a notion of the need to enfold these theories in one's notion of the world system. this work has no theory at all of imperialism. So its primary propagandists have no theory of imperialism. I mean, another figure who is making kind of a bit of a hullabaloo these days is Matt Huber. Matt Huber has no theory of imperialism in his work, Climate Change is Class War, but has no notion of that there is also a global class war that unfurls within an uneven world system. So when I say retooling, I also mean that they just don't mention imperialism at all. The theoretical advances that were the fruit of the organic intellectuals of the national liberation movements and the pan-African movements from the 1950s onwards are erased and suppressed from this new ecological Marxist literature, which then becomes the basis for a huge number of northern conversations about ecological change within our world system, right? So it's not like people were like, oh, we have to absorb the insights of Rodney and Amin and Carmen Cromart. and Dan Nabudere, right? Or Roy Maramorini or Vania Bambira. People were not like, we have to synthesize this with our new ecological insights to arrive at a higher synthesis. They said, okay, let's reset. Let's misread Marx. Let's build essentially on the Eurocentric iterations of Marxism that were developed in the 1970s and 1980s. And here I'm talking about figures like Robert Brenner and Bill Warren, who were extremely Eurocentric Marxists. Brenner in particular sought to deny the necessary role of primitive accumulation in the world system. Warren basically said that dependency theory was false and that imperialism was leading to progressive development of the productive forces in Europe. the Third World, taking as his example the military dictatorship of Brazil, for example, and also South Korea. Very odd to take Brazil because this was kind of the paradigm case of Marxist dependency, as it was elaborated by Roy Maromarini, showing all the class-based dynamics of dependent industrialization in Brazil. So basically, the retooling has been to kind of carry on the legacy of the most Eurocentric Marxists, of course, all published in the same journal, right? This is what's also missed is that this is an institutional decision. I mean, people tend, and this is why I don't like the term the left. I mean, we have a set of institutions that are owned by a very small, very wealthy set of individuals, right? and that make specific political decisions that reflect Eurocentric political consciousness, right? And this is a new left review of Verso that put out these historically, what I would frankly call racist renditions of historical materialism that basically suppress the role of primitive accumulation and imperialism within the world system. or call it a progressive force within the world system. And now are doing the same with a wide set of very useless literatures on ecological Marxism, which missed the mark in their Marxism consistently and have very little bearing on a worldwide movement towards eco-socialism. And that this is a continuous project. that is very deliberate and that reflects a certain consciousness reflects a certain agenda reflects a certain set of interests and there's actually harmful to the attempt to change the world on a worldwide basis in an egalitarian direction right it is even it is harmful to those efforts And we need to be aware of that as we intellectually prepare ourselves to put forward collectively different ideas that are suitable for making a world that's big enough for everybody, which means starting from the particular struggles as they emerge in the periphery. I mean, I have not been following the West African events all closely enough, but already you see the same fundamental division. You see all this banter suddenly about Russian neocolonialism, Russian imperialism, and militaristic probably regressive coup d'etat when people are breaking the actual dynamics of Northern imperialism in West Africa, Northern neocolonialism in West Africa, those actual dynamics, those actual historical dynamics are being ruptured. And suddenly people are complaining that it's not occurring in the way that they are prescribing. And so it's the, this kind of historic consciousness of large portions of the Northern Marxist intelligentsia reappears in the one form or another, in every world event. And so, of course, makes its particular appearance when it comes to the ecological crisis. I think it can be a bit harder to discern precisely because the ecological crisis does does present itself as having a universal aspect of crisis. I mean, and this is clear, and this is why it may make it a little bit harder to discern that what poses itself as a universal solution, in fact, is in reality, a very particular and in fact, a parochial solution that is not reflecting the worldwide interests of people outside of England and Iceland.

Speaker 3: For sure. And kind of shifting gears here, you also know how, and I'm quoting here, many commodity crops can only be produced in the periphery, which is why it harbors massive labor reservoirs in its dark by underdevelopment to compress tropical commodity prices and preserve the value of money. Such concrete appearances were central to the primitive accumulation via drain that produced monopoly capitalism. So just talk more about what you described as fossil universalism and the overprivileging of climate over broader ecological crises. Overlook super exploitation, international value flows, suppress the basic fact that many people in the world system are not and will not have anything more than a marginal relationship with fossil capital, except as its energy poor victims and ignore the imperial warfare associated with defending petrodollar imperialism and the profits associated with core oil monopolies. end quote.

Max Ajl: Right, right. So there was a lot that I packed into those couple of paragraphs, that's for sure. So first of all, this is a reaction to, again, the argument that capitalism is kind of so universalized that it doesn't rely on any historical geographical particularities within the world system, that it doesn't matter. You that different aspects, the different historically constituted historical geographies of the world system are not relevant particularly anymore for theorizing capitalism. Now, This is something I picked up from Malm to critique. His source for this, of course, and this is more the smuggling of certain types of reaction into our contemporary mental ecology. The source for this is an extreme Zionist Marxist, Moshe Poiston, who was a vociferous critic of Palestinian nationalism and basically thought that nearly all contemporary forms of anti-Zionism are anti-Semitic. So this is the source of the argument that we don't need to pay attention to the particular appearances in world history, the particular kind of idiosyncrasies of historical capitalism and should instead just diagnose and fight against it. a universalized capitalism, right? That's the original source of this mental pathology. Now, when this makes its way, and when you echo this argument, you create a mental justification, an ideological justification for ignoring the concrete analysis of concrete situations of development and underdevelopment on a world scale. So you can say, fine, it sounds very nice to say that the rise of oil has meant that capitalism no longer depends on certain concrete, you know, historical geographies in order to develop. But then, okay, what was... What was England doing in the Caribbean and South Asia? In fact, it was benefiting from the historical productivity of the crops grown there, or that could be grown there, which could not be grown in the North. where you can have double or even triple cropping in certain portions of those areas, leading to much higher productivity per unit of land, where even more to the point, certain things that can be grown there and that were absolutely vital for either capital growth for the Industrial Revolution, or that were absolutely necessary, for example, for, at an earlier point, for the food basket for workers in the Industrial Revolution, things that were grown in the Caribbean and South Asia could not be grown in the North. So, you know, Sidney Mintz shows, it was an incredible book that everybody should read, Sweetness and Power showed, and of course, he was in dialogue with older figures like Eric Williams. was showing very, very, very, very, very clearly, right, how sugar became a constituent, a central component of the diet of the British working class during the Industrial Revolution. It cheapened the cost of the reproduction of workers in cities and therefore allowed for a greater value extraction, a greater and higher accumulation of capital in in northern metropolises amongst northern capitalists that actually led to the worldwide diffusion and expansion of capitalism and imperialism as world systems. Now, in this case of sugar, a critical element was, and these types of Marxists have a rough time wrapping their heads around this, is the sugar. People needed something sweet, high calorie, calorically dense on a per hectare scale that could be shipped easily and thrown into food or actually thrown into the tea that came from South Asia, which was also caffeinated, gave workers a lot of energy, suppressed hunger if in case they were getting undernourished due to not having enough food. And tea and sugar cannot be grown in Northern Europe, right? Now, This is so commonsensical that one has to use a lot of elaborate language about constitutive and necessary versus non-necessary factors in the historical development of capitalism in order to suppress these issues. But in fact, they're very central. This was part of the so-called industrial revolution and the development of industrial capitalism as it happened in history. So if you want to tell the story of how that happened, then you need to discuss, and this is something, again, that Northern thinkers have been corrected upon, going back to Eric Williams, then you do need to discuss the state of trade. Then you do need to discuss the drain coming from South Asia that was a central component of the development of capitalism on a world scale, including the capital exports from England to the United States that also went along with the population exports. that also meant, in turn, the settler colonial devastation of the Indigenous populations of the United States, that these were all holistic elements of a single world historical process, right? And that as soon as you call it fossil capitalism and you abstract from all these necessary elements and you say, we only want to focus on a particular set of dynamics in order to isolate them, okay, you have the tendency to say, okay, war and colonialism are less central to the development of historical capitalism. And they're also therefore, their reverse coin that is the national liberation movements and contemporary struggles for national sovereignty are not actually central for the construction of eco-socialism. So lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. And so To go into this question of the contemporary commodity crop exports, right? I mean, from the 1950s, 60s, then even more so with the 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of advanced containerization, refrigeration technologies. you saw an ever-increasing reliance on specific commodity crops that could only be grown in the South, but also would be refrigerated. And here we're talking particularly about fruits and vegetables, that these became very important components of Northern food baskets. They also became very important components, therefore, of Northern social packs and what you can call the wages of the North. And they became part of the kind of lullaby or the material lullaby or the bribes given to Northern working classes in order to enfold Northern working classes into support for capitalism as a world system, right? And this is, you've seen this then politically reflected in the political practice of the social democratic and labor parties, including kind of the US equivalent of the social democratic or labor party, namely the Democrats. You see essentially effective support for imperialism and you see it grounded then, you see the dynamics that it's grounded in, in that imperialism is essentially promising to supply certain aspects of the northern needs, right? In this case, the northern working class consumption basket, for example, having this great variety of fruits available at a supermarket at any given time. And then it's primarily exported from the South. I mean, this is not only the case. Of course, this is the case for a huge variety of spices that people prefer to have good tasting food that come, for example, from India. This is the case of coffee, which is also broadly not growable in the North. I mean, small exceptions like Hawaii. This is the case of the fruits and vegetables of North Africa, which are basically exported to Europe or they're grown in southern Spain in greenhouses, primarily by Moroccan female migrant labor. So you have these dynamics that are very much grounded, first of all, in a material geography that is certain places have certain climates and climates. they're required to produce certain crops. And this then is linked to the question of producing them cheaply, which requires, first of all, that people be alienated from control over the land within those countries. which is why there's historic campaigns against agrarian reform in all the countries of the South in order to maintain them as commodity crop exporters. And a corollary of that is that you want to consistently cheapen wages in order to make sure that the prices of those exported commodities are as cheap as possible. Now, one historic way that wages were kept low was, of course, the slave trade, where you don't have to pay a wage. And another way that wages are kept low is by creating massive labor reservoirs, which means that you have a reserve army of labor, and it leads to massive suppression of wages in that national social formation, given that labor cannot freely move over borders in our world system. And this leads to a suppression of wages, leads to the suppression of wage costs within the cost of capital in the production process. And this then leads to the ability to suppress the prices of the goods themselves when they enter northern markets and enter the northern consumption basket. So all of these are part of historical capitalism. They can't be separated from it. And then, of course, there's the question of these countries that have no insertion at all, that just their issues have nothing to do with something called fossil capitalism. This doesn't mean they don't have an issue of global warming. Yemen is absolutely encountering a problem of global warming. There's no question about it. But Yemen, and I looked at the statistics before writing this article, I mean, has, I think, decreased per capita and absolute either emissions or energy use over the period of the war itself. Now, if one takes a very mechanistic approach to this theory of fossil capitalism, one could easily argue that, okay, well, would it be good for Yemen then to liberate itself, which would then lead to an increase in its consumption of fossil fuels, which would then lead to an increase in per capita emissions? Now, to be clear, I don't think that these figures using fossil capital necessarily want to continue the persecution of Yemen. Although I should add that For example, David Harvey, who probably many of your readers know, signed a petition calling the Iranian support for the Yemeni National Liberation Movement an instance of sub-imperialism. right? So take what you will of that. But this actually is a call for hamstringing Yemen's ability to defend itself from this neocolonial and imperialist incursion, right? Now, the point is that the struggles of Yemen, the struggle of Syria against this internally funded and externally funded incursion with some hundreds of thousands of mercenaries, they don't have a lot to do with fossil capitalism, right? Now, they have huge problems of global warming that need to be confronted and armored. And of course, the policies, for that matter, the internal social structures of these societies need to move in a much more egalitarian direction in order for them to adequately armor themselves against global warming and try to make sure that their societies can survive the next 77 years until maybe temperatures can start to reduce again to livable levels. But fossil capitalism is not offering an adequate theoretical map into what those struggles look like. And in fact, I would argue that it actually obscures and blocks them from coming into view.

Jay: Yeah, I just want to do a quick follow up because, you know, just to, again, ground this in a in a recent debate, actually a Twitter discourse. But Malcolm Harris had recently talked about fresh bananas in every American 7-Eleven. And I'll just read the quote of what he said. He said, pro-growth lefties accused their opponents of being out of touch with working class preferences and focused on consumption instead of production. But what do they imagine planning support looks like for, say, fresh bananas at every American 7-Eleven among the world's banana workers? That means fewer bananas for American workers. But if we're focused on production, not consumption, then the expropriation and suppression of Chiquita Corp is obviously a huge win for the global working class as well as the environment. He went on to discuss this and it ranged into a crazy Twitter debate of whether you were pro or anti banana. But it is touching on the same point you made about the variety of produce. Obviously, there's also always the NPR just recently put out another piece where they were talking about, you know, who's going to pick our strawberries again, which is like seemingly almost an annual feature for them. So yeah, I don't know if you wanted to wade into any of that discourse, but if you had thoughts on any of that.

Max Ajl: Well, you know, there was a bit of silliness about it, but I think Malcolm did actually a good service in raising this fundamental issue, which is the inequality in the global division of labor and the question of access to certain types of commodities as portions of the northern consumption basket, how that's become normalized and what the implications are. Now, there's two aspects of it. I mean, on the one hand, of course, this is a discussion amongst people who are you know, on Twitter, basically, and also outside of Twitter. Now, I don't mean to dismiss it, like a lot of us are on Twitter. And this is too easy a way to dismiss what people are saying, oh, you're just on Twitter, like, it's always someone on Twitter saying someone else is just on Twitter, like, right. You know, either it's a place where people are having a political conversation with some sort of impact on the world, or it's eminently ignorable. But like, you can't just like, flip a coin depending on your mood and decide what it's convenient. I find this is a very cynical deployment. You're on Twitter discourse, usually deployed by reactionaries. Bracketing that, right? This was raising fundamentally the question of what is the worldwide division of labor? What are its historical conditions? What could that look like under eco-socialism? Now, the explosiveness of the reaction to it, of course, was very telling, right? It was basically saying, okay, well, Any attack on what Northern workers, because of the ugly history of... colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, the way that people have become accustomed to consuming certain things is aligned too far, that we cannot raise that issue and it will alienate the Northern working class. Now this, in the first case, is quite ridiculous. I mean, even the Northern working class, I mean, like there's no shortage of Ecuadorian immigrants in the United States. who are also now part of the northern working class and who are well aware of the impact of banana export on the lives of people in Ecuador. That's first of all, right? So it's actually quite disturbing homogenization of what exactly is the working class, right? Second of all, it is actually claiming to speak for the interest of the working class, but ignoring the fact that the working class on the whole lives in the south and has a particular set of demands for its political and social liberation articulated at various levels of sophistication with various levels of political representation. And those are ignored. So it's like nothing is too good for the working class. But which working class are you talking about? You're actually only talking about what you think the American working class wants. wants for itself and what indeed it will accept in terms of a transformation of its consumption habits in order to convert the world system into a just and democratic and egalitarian world system. Now, there's two further aspects of it, right, that I think are important and probably a bit suppressed in the debate. I mean, one of them is, of course, that the access to bananas in the North is politically maintained at our exact current moment. I mean, where are major banana exporters? Central America? Ecuador? Philippines, all major banana exporters. All of those regions or countries, every single one has been a historical and contemporary victim of U.S. intervention, right? Including the current moment, NED activities in Ecuador, right? That basically derailed the Correa agenda with all of its limits. Widespread support for militarized counterinsurgency in Philippines, including terror listing the NPA in the Philippines, which is the only mass force actually advocating for agrarian reform and national industrialization in the Philippines. And it's the point where it's criminalized to even have any, basically to have contact with that organization, right? And they end up very isolated on a world scale from even the American working class, right? So I think it's very important to mention the question of the global division of labor, but I think we also need to mention in order for people to have consciousness of and therefore to adequately resist the political mechanisms through which the worldwide division of labor is maintained. Right. Which means and this is entirely, you know, these are legitimate things. If you don't like the Worldwide Division of Labor, you should discuss and resist all forms of U.S. intervention on a world scale. You should resist the terror lists, which are actually products of the Oslo process, the Oslo surrender process, which was imposed on the Philippines. I mean, the best discussion I've seen this, and I'm biased, is by Charlotte Cates, which I published in Jacobin in another lifetime. And anyone can read it. Just Google Charlotte Cates Jackman. It's an absolutely outstanding article explaining how the terrorists work, among other things. But you need to resist those things. Right. And that was not part of the conversation. Right. That these are that's, I think, identified as geopolitics. That's a discussion of imperialism, which is separate from a discussion about the ecology or ecological planning. or even the worldwide division of labor, which ends up being rendered often in more economistic terms rather than something that is constituted and created politically. And I think this then, because it becomes rendered in this form, it ends up having a depoliticizing effect. And I think people are like, well, what does this have to do with our work? Well, okay, there's actually a lot of work in solidarity with the people, with poor people in the great work going on about agrarian reform there separate from these political forces like okay well engage with that somehow right that's very important that's the one hand one thing that got suppressed another thing is that in fact the irony is that a lot of these pro-growth forces so-called eco-modernist forces right and again i think this is a symptom of the way the debates occur in an idealistic level, severed from the political mechanics of the actors in these debates. I mean, you know, one of the main ideologues is Matthew Huber, and he's part of the Bread and Roses Caucus, which has historically been a basically imperialist caucus in DSA, affiliated with very often the right wing of Jacobin Magazine, which also defends This theory of a flat capitalism as propounded by the likes of Vivek Chhibra and so forth, right? So actually, these are, and of course, this is then aggressively platformed by Verso Books and so forth, who originally published all of these figures. So again, there's a constellation of actual people acting to defend a particular vision of the world. obviously an incorrect vision of the world, but also one that's very hostile to a national liberation struggle of the South, which is hostile to an analysis that puts imperialism at the center of the world system, and accordingly constructs a particular parochial Marxist political ecology, which is severed from any capacity to understand and act upon the world in a serious and transformative way, right? And to know these little small details of who's doing what, what their political affiliations, I think it's very central to know exactly who's pushing the project. And what interests are at stake behind it?

Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I appreciate that breakdown too, for sure. So in the section on eco-modernism, you are further challenging the claims to an undifferentiated mass without distinct orientations to the protective apparatus, or primarily or solely as the industrial, laboring, or unionized sectors ignore, if not deprecate, discussions of non-directly waged labor within the processes of social labor." You kind of just spoke about this, but you also write how the framework of eco-modernism, and I'm quoting here again, has been broadly silent on trade union support for imperialism. These points do not deny the core working class as a role in the ecological transition, but clarify that constituting an internationalist front must account for the difference within the working class on a national basis and the need to rupture the union with union support for imperialism. So talk about this a bit, if you will.

Max Ajl: Yeah, yeah. So these are vital things to raise on two fronts, right? I mean, first of all, you have the question that this workerist notion of the working class basically revises and accordingly ignores, like, many decades of work primarily done by Marxist feminists, right, about social reproduction and the role of unwaged labor in capitalism. that capitalism rests on a hidden subsidy of unwaged labor. A lot of work was done in relation to functional dualism in Latin America, the role of subsistence agriculture in providing, in great measure, at least done by women and also children, in providing for The reproduction of the labor force, which then could go work, be a rural proletariat on plantations, right? This is the historical version of this. And even in the contemporary version of it, the reproduction of the working class is relying for a great deal on relatively uncompensated, unwaged labor. Labor primarily done by women. And this is all totally excluded from this literature. Right. Which also then really is kind of low key presenting a very classic parochial notion of like people in factories. That's the working class. And it's like, come on, like we really these debates are very old. And they're being aggressively ignored. And how can we advance intellectually, theoretically, analytically, politically, organizationally, if someone is kind of bringing us back to like pre-Copernican level of debates in a systematic way and in a very annoying and drumbeated way? no, no, no, wait, we need to read the debate, whether exactly the sun is rotating around the earth or the earth rotating around the sun. And like, imagine you tell this to the physicist, they're like, we need to read debate that how are we going to advance knowledge? And then you're like, okay, well, maybe the goal isn't really to advance knowledge, it's actually to advance a political agenda. Right? That's one thing. Another small portion that you didn't quote that I just want to add to as well is which was this question of the role of unwaged labor in the reproduction of nature, right? And I took this point from Archana Prasad, and I actually think this has revolutionary implications in that a great deal of the preservation of what we call nature which is kind of a rough term, in fact, in my opinion. But a great deal of that is done either by indigenous people or by agroecological peasantries in the third world or by pastoralists. What presents itself to us as historical nature, first of all, changes over time. It's been in Tons of change over the last 30,000 years. I mean, of course, much more. But and it's very often human created, like the whole of the United States, the whole of the Americas at the moment of the colonial incursion was not just like an unpeopled Eden. that kind of was like roamed through occasionally by some people just kind of chilling and like picking walnuts or whatever. No, this was a cultivated, managed, engineered, more or less ecologically sustainable landscape that with a huge variety of different cultivation systems, a huge variety of semi-managed animal rearing systems, for example, what was going on with the buffalo, a huge variety of intercropping systems, for example, the Three Sisters, a huge variety of terracing systems that were very much dominant in the Andes, a huge variety of kind of these hilltop formations and black earth formations and forest gardens as were dominant in the Amazon and Brazil, a huge variety of these raised beds that were dominant around Mexico City, and in the Bolivian Altiplano, right? You had a huge variety of these types of installations that amounted to an entire cultivated landscape that was actively produced by human labor, right? And it was also not just land, but also, if you prefer to call it that, although it was pre-capitalist, it was kind of embodied labor of human civilizations that were completely erased by the settler colonial invasion and incursion into Bolivia. the Americas. I'm talking about the Americas because these are just, this is a specific case I know best when it comes to this specific issue. So this was also part of settler colonialism. It was a process of kind of environmental devastation that very much actually ripped apart not only an inherited physical infrastructure, right, but a constant capital, if you will, but also ripped apart, of course, the ideological superstructure necessary to maintain that and kind of deprive people from that alienated it and put in its place, the capitalist forms of thinking about the world. So this is all very much erased. And it's also erased, I think, not only in the right wing debate, but also in the left wing debate. So there's often a kind of say, okay, the indigenous people are in comity with nature. Well, I mean, in large portions of the world that are under indigenous land management still, which are some hundreds of millions of people, first of all, they're engaged often, not always, but often, and the not always is also an important qualifier, but are engaged in primary production, often using relatively more ecologically sustainable techniques and often maintaining these kind of archipelagos of biodiversity that in turn require a great deal of human labor in order to maintain. So this whole idea, this whole kind of extent, the whole extent biodiversity hotspots and their linkages to indigenous people on a worldwide scale are, in fact, the product of human labor, or if you really feel the need to use this term, the working class, right? Yet, this form of labor, this form of working class, and I just use it because these people claim to be interested in all working class people, this is totally erased from the analysis, right? So this then has an elective affinity with these kind of nascent forms of ecological planning, which basically call for purging half the planet of human beings, claiming that humans are an irreconcilable antagonism with non-human nature, when in fact, it's very much not the case. And a lot of the richest biodiversity hotspots on the planet are basically the fruit of human labor, right? Or have a human labor input in order to maintain their well-being, right? So this is critically important. And this is also reflected, for example, the negative aspects of this are reflected in the UN calculations, which basically assert that humans should be paid to preserve nature and which implies, of course, that right now humans are in an antagonism with nature and need a material incentive to preserve nature, rather than understanding that under capitalism, capitalism doesn't value not only human production and reproduction of other humans, but doesn't value the human reproduction of the non-human environment, so that the problem is capitalism and not a payment to humans for not valuing nature adequately, right? So this is all really central, and it should be part of enriching our collective discussions about how to move towards a theory that is the basis for a political common front, right? Now, this question of trade union support for imperialism probably is something your listeners know plenty about and don't need my analysis or explication about in order to understand the phenomenon. But of course, you know, the most blatant case is, of course, the AFL-CIA in the United States. which has been a mainstay of US support for imperialism on a worldwide scale. The trade union support for imperialism is very well known. It has only been exceptionally the trade unions have ruptured for support for imperialism. If you want to fetishize workers, and their organizations, and you don't want to engage with this question of trade union support for imperialism, including, of course, take the most basic example. I mean, do you want me to support the Histadrut in Israel, which is a trade union of sorts, right? That's a trade union. It has workers in it, right? Most people are capable of understanding, with the exception of German leftists, that there are workers we do not support, right? Or there's workers organizations that we do not support. Right. So this is very much elided from the conversation. I should say this is also a southern question. I mean, look at the Zimbabwean trade unions, right? Very much opportunist and aligned with imperialism in the recent periods against the agrarian reform. So the role, and this comes up a lot in very polemical ways, I think, in a lot of spaces. You know, the role of northern workers or, you know, northern semi-proletariat or northern lumpenproletariat or any of these categories in a just ecological transition, I don't think is up, from my perspective, is not to be a priori ruled out. but also cannot be a priority ruled in. I mean, it has to be a question of people can be included in common fronts when there are relatively common analyses and when there are relatively common objectives. But if the analysis says there's no imperialism, we live in a flat capitalism, and if the objective is omitting the importance of agrarian reform and national liberation, you can't have a common front. right? And the problem, of course, is that people do these kind of analyses, then form a certain type of class consciousness. And that's why they need to be contested, right? Because these analyses, which... make no critique of labor union support for imperialism, make no mention of imperialism, make no mention of uneven accumulation on a world scale, make no mention of the particularly developmental needs of the South, then create a certain mentality in the North that then prevents many people in the North from envisioning what entering a common front with the movements of the South actually would look like and what is required to do so. And this is, in fact, a distinctly anti-internationalist political orientation.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. So in your discussion of extractivism, there's a passage I like to read because I think it truly brilliantly summarizes its intellectual and ideological limitations. And I'm quoting here. All that there are justice to the global evolution of the world capitalist system and the historical insertion of a peripheral states into the global division of labor, the world system and imperialism persistently evaporates. And from that sociologies, there's hardly a single clear reference in extractivist literature to the difficulties in moving towards nationalization or large scale agrarian reform in a moment where we're in peripheral state structures such as Haiti, Iraq, Syria, or previously Afghanistan, half is subject to predatory attacks and partial recolonization by core states. The imperialist regulation of the International Division of Labor only enters obliquely through a discussion of globalization or accumulation by dispossession, drawing on David Harvey's to race to the structured nature of the center periphery contradiction and historical capitalism, end quote. So if you can just elaborate on the predatory attacks on peripheral states such as Haiti or Iraq or Syria, etc., that happen subjectively, and how they happen, and by and large, neglected in larger understandings of the contradiction and development of historical or globalized capitalism.

Max Ajl: Yeah, so I think I'll stick with the case I know best in this situation, which is, of course, Syria, which has been under continuous U.S. assault since 2011, which was actually really prepared starting in 2006. I mean, Seymour Hersh started writing about what was called the redirection, and he was saying that the U.S. would start funding right-wing mercenaries in Iraq and elsewhere, in order to prepare them for an assault on the pro-sovereign forces in the Arab region, mainly Hezbollah, and I say the Arab-Iranian region, Iran and Syria. Syria, which is a major rear base, not only for those forces, but also, for example, was a historical, to that point, was a headquarters for Hamas, and also the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine was in relatively strong relations and considered Syria a relative safe haven as compared to the surrounding monarchies, right? Yeah. That was when they assaulted. Now, it's clear that in Syria, there was widespread anger at both the political repression of the Syrian government and also the rising economic disparities and oppressions experienced under the gradual neoliberalization that was occurring in Syria, starting in the early 90s and escalating in the 2000s under the social market economy. It's very foolish, I think, to deny that those processes were occurring, but it's also very clear. And Patrick Higgins has done outstanding work documenting in detail how this happened in an article in Middle East Critique, and also in, again, an earlier article that essentially set in motion my departure from Jacobin Magazine in The War on Syria. and, you know, showed that, in fact, you know, there were attacks on security forces from militaristic elements internal to what was called the protest movement, starting in at least April 2011. There were accusations of mercenary infiltration going back to February or March 2011 in Syria over the Lebanese border. I mean, Hassan bin Jiddu, who was the founder of Al Mayadeen either quit or was fired from Al Jazeera for not airing the footage and the reporting of these attempted attempt or successful paramilitary infiltrations from the right wing forces in Lebanon into Syria to kind of quickly militarize it. It wasn't reported that of the 3000 dead in the first couple months, there were of course, many civilians and there were also it was reported that that there were at a floor 300 and at a maximum 1200 security forces killed amongst those 3000, which also included a great number of civilians. There was an attempt to spark a war in Syria, which would lead to the increasing militarization of the repression, which would lead to the militarization of people in the protests themselves, who would then offer their support to the armed brigades once The entire situation was militarized. And once the situation is militarized, then you burn down the entire country. And that was the basic U.S. objective. Once it realized, especially that it could not get rid of Assad without an escalation, that it wasn't, that would have led into a nuclear confrontation with Russia, the agenda was to maintain the war to burn down the entire country, right? Now, you know, I think, first of all, of course, Syria, I don't know, actually, if, like, people are still considering the Syria something that, like, they'll verbally fight to the death over or whatever in the Western laughter if people accept that it was a regime change operation. Actually, this is something that's a little confusing to me. But, you know, 10, 11, 12 years ago, when you pointed out that these operations were happening, you would be called a Bashar supporter. And I'm like... It has nothing to do with supporting Bashar. This is a question of supporting Syria against the assault on it as a country. Now, that's one thing. But I think there's a trouble suturing these kind of ecological analyses to this question of imperialism. Like, again, I think they operate in different worlds. And I think a lot of anti-imperialist activists, when it comes to ecology, it's not like people are disinterested in ecology from my perspective, but they're just like, well, you guys are talking about something else. You guys are talking about whether or not Malcolm could have a banana and whether that's going to happen under eco-socialism. I'm trying to talk to you about what's happening in West Africa and Haiti and the U.S. role there. And so I think these discourses, because of the way they're constructed, often are not able to have a dialogue with one another. And so this is kind of what I'm also trying to do with the article is to say, okay, like all of this stuff is very related to one another. We can see how it relates to one another as soon as we think about how these discourses and their theoretical and political implications are interact with actual history. And this is kind of a long way around the bend to get back to this question of extractivism. Extractivism is basically a critique of the developmental choices of the Latin American governments. starting. And extractivism really began to get a great deal of vogue, I think, in the Western left, first of all, in around 2011. And then escalating, I think, with Naomi Klein's work, which lowly began to suppress an analysis of capitalism. with an analysis of extraction and extractivism. And it really became in vogue, let's say. It really became a way of analyzing all forms of labor exploitation within the world system, all forms of ecological exploitation within the world system. They came under the purview of this kind of idea of extractivism, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is that, and this is, I'm opening this up as a hypothesis because I haven't done the intellectual work to substantiate it. My sense is that, furthermore, the idea of extractivism really was given a lot of heft by international NGOs and think tanks funded by the North, which took up the legitimate the entirely legitimate unease of certain communities in Latin America with escalated mineral extraction that had started to occur around 2006, 2007 under the national popular governments and kind of highlighted it as the developmental question facing Latin America, which could then be used for the purpose of undermining support for the national popular projects of Latin America. This is, again, a hypothesis. Could be wrong, but it should be explored more. Now, extractivism itself emerged at that moment, right? I mean, there were people talking about extractivismo before 2011, right? But as it gained more and more heft, we cannot ignore that it was gaining this heft, not because extraction was new and not because we lacked... vocabulary to deal with the question of extraction. But it also, again, this is a hypothesis, I think it gained a lot of traction in the North to talk about Latin American governments because there is an interest in undermining the resource nationalism of the Latin American governments and the redirection of rent from resource extraction to social democratic third world development, which were the historical achievements occurring under Evo Morales, under Rafael Correa, under Hugo Chavez, right? And extractivism proved a very useful theoretical tool to attack those developments. Now, At the theoretical or analytical level, extractivism says, this is a bad planning method. Let us propose a better planning method. This poses immediately two questions. One, why does the government choose a particular method of social and economic development and investment and extraction of resources and investment of the proceeds of those resources? Why does that happen in a particular way? It's a silly question in a sense, or it's not silly because I frame it in a complicated way, but it has a simple answer. I mean, that is given in the first case, historically, a government inherits a certain social structure, a certain level of development and certain ways of securing capital for needed imports. And it has to work with that set of constraints when it takes power. And then it has to move to try and shift them. To put it in technical terms, it has to shift its comparative advantages. Historically, of course, governments wanted to carry out agrarian reform and industrialization, right? Now, You are Venezuela. You are Chavez. And you want to change the pattern of production in your society. What happens is that you actually face a military coup while you're trying to get control of the oil industry. right? You face a coup d'etat, you lose your power, and then you are pushed back into office by a massive and unprecedented mobilization of the popular classes, right? Okay. So then you understand that your position is both imperiled and also defended, right? That there are constraints and you are realizing that you are under a heinous US attack on any attempt to change your social structures, right? Not only are you under a heinous U.S. attack, but that U.S. attack has a domestic social base that is a domestic neocolonial allies within Venezuelan society who are going to support that attack. What are you going to do? Well, one thing you can do is if you have a huge peasant army and you have the Soviet Union behind you. and I'm here talking about China, you say, well, fuck it. I am going to carry out a historic agrarian reform, shatter the back of the feudal landholding class, which is the organic basis of reaction in my society, and advance towards socialist construction with massive Soviet aid towards the end of endogenous industrialization. That's a great idea if it's 1949 to 1952 and you are China. That's not a very possible option when it's 2003, and there is no Soviet Union, and China is not offering that type of developmental aid to the South, and agrarian reform is out of style, And the world already has a massive excess of industrial capacity and saturated markets. And it's very hard to bring enough resources online for an indigenous industrialization process. Your developmental options are a lot more limited. They're not fixed. but it's much harder to do certain things. So what are you going to do if you're Bolivia, if you're Venezuela? You're more likely to expand the production of oil in order to both avoid a confrontation with domestic capital and to provide sufficient rent in order to both provide for the day-to-day interests of your popular classes by building up hospitals, by building up schools, by investing in education. by investing in public infrastructure like subways, by investing in public housing, which has been a continuous achievement also of the Maduro government, all at the same time as you make some kind of social peace with the domestic capitalist class, you don't dispossess them, and you make a certain amount of peace with the right-wing elements in the army because they start to siphon off oil revenue through the dual exchange system, right? And all of this, of course, you don't reduce the amount of extraction. Probably you increase it during this period because the more rent you have to distribute, the more you're able to placate or attend to the desperate needs of not only your own people, but also these people who are antagonistic to the project, but you don't feel confident enough to enter an open class warfare with them. Right. Meanwhile, on a world scale, this is where, you know, these kind of potted mononational histories of development are actively harmful to our understanding of the world system. Chavez is not an idiot, right? First of all, he's seeing, okay, I'm trying to carry out an agrarian reform, but from like 2004 to 2007, there are hundreds of peasants being, his own people are being, his own activists, right, are being assassinated all across Western Venezuela when they try to provide the endogenous motor for land to the Tiller agrarian farm. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, this guy who spent about eight hours a day reading, knows exactly what, for surely knows exactly what's happening in Zimbabwe, which is under aggressive U.S. sanctions precisely for a land to the tiller agrarian reform, right? Historically isolating and oppressive U.S. sanctions, some of the most comprehensive sanctions imposed on any country in modern world history, right? So it's known what happens It's known exactly what happens when you put in place a land-to-the-tiller agrarian reform. And so you're less likely to do it, or at the very least, you're going to be aware, okay, these are the risks. And whether or not this is actually documented in the existing academic literature on Venezuela, I have no idea, right? But everyone knew what's happening in Zimbabwe and the consequences. So everyone knows, and even if you don't, you know that the more aggressively you confront domestic capital and aggress the domestic capitalist class structure, that's the historic basis of the partnership with US imperialism, the more pissed off at US imperialism is going to be, and the more it's going to attack you even more than it already is. So there are global pressures on any attempt at transformation in any third world state. These are bearing down on all third world leaders who are attempting to transform their domestic social structure. It affects the tempo of their decisions. It affects their willingness to redistribute or expropriate wealth. Therefore, it also says, okay, where are we going to export some of these contradictions we face in the course of popular development? They may indeed export them onto those people living on top of domestic oil mineral resources. In turn, those people... may be unable to make their voices heard in national dialogues. They may indeed be a minority and they may indeed find their allies in the U.S. government and USAID and NED and foreign social democratic foundations who are saying, oh, either let us highlight your sufferings and let's instrumentalize it in order to destabilize these Latin American governments. And this is very similar to what happened in Nicaragua, right, with the mosquito Indians. I mean, there were these same types of counterinsurgency and social fracturing techniques used. And, you know, the whole theory of extractivism, which I think is very messy, and I show why in the article, doesn't allow for a serious discussion of of the political panorama against which Southern nations, which are resource-based, are attempting to carry out popular development strategies. This isn't to say that people aren't suffering when their lands could be despoiled because of extraction, but it says, okay, we at least need an adequate theoretical toolkit that allows us to apprehend the choices at hand and, for that matter, mistakes made by these governments. Extractivism does not seem to me to provide any sort of the necessary intellectual equipment that can provide theoretical or political clarity about the choices that are being made.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you for watching! Thank you.

Max Ajl: Thank you.

Speaker 4: Thank you.