Guerrilla History - A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things w/ Jason W. Moore & Raj Patel

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In this terrific episode, we talk with Professors Jason W. Moore and  Raj Patel about their fabulous work A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, which analyzes the history of the world’s planetary emergency through Cheap nature, money, work, care, food, energy, & lives.  A super important conversation with two vital thinkers, you’re definitely going to want to read the book if you haven’t already! Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, and has authored multiple outstanding books.  You can follow Jason on twitter @oikeios   Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist, and academic. He is Research Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University. He has numerous projects that you can keep up with by following him on Twitter @_RajPatel   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hockamaki, joined, as usual, by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you and with a set of great guests today. Yeah, absolutely. And joined as well by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. This will be a fun one.

Yeah, absolutely. We've got a great one in store. And before I introduce the guests, I would like to just remind the listeners that to keep up with all of the latest that's on the show, you can follow us on Twitter at Guerrilla underscore pod, and you can help support the show. Help us keep the lights on and keep doing what we enjoy doing by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, guerrilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A

history. And by doing that, you'll be able to get bonus content. And like I said, helping keep the show up and running. But today, as both of my co-hosts have mentioned, we have two great guests to talk about an absolutely fantastic book. One of the, honestly, one of the best I've read in recent

years. We have Raj Patel, who is a writer and activist and an academic, research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Hello, Raj. I know that you're a long-time listener of the show, at least this is what you've told me, so it's nice to finally meet you. That was lovely to be here. I'm going to say, long-time listener, first-time caller. I'm very excited. Okay, great. And I also know that we are joined by another long-time listener and a returning guest, one who we had fantastic feedback for the last time he was on the show. Jason W. Moore, who is a professor of world history and world ecology at Binghamton University.

Hello, Jason. It's really nice to see you again. Great to be here again, comrades. Wonderful. I'm looking forward to it. As am I. And the book, which we all enjoyed tremendously, is a history of the world in seven cheap things, a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. It came out a few years ago, but highly recommend all of the listeners if you haven't already gotten a copy and read it. You must do so. And even if you have already read it and it's been a few years, you should read it again. That's my pitch to all of the listeners. But I want to start this conversation by turning to Raj.

So we had Jason on the show once before to talk about the capitalocene and the world ecology conversation. And that was a really great conversation. It was a fairly lengthy and we really had great feedback to it. We got a lot of messages in saying that the listeners, listeners really enjoyed listening to Jason talk about these concepts. But I think that we should remind the listeners about these concepts of Capitolocene and the World Ecology Conversation. But since you weren't here last time, Raj, I'll let you do that. And you might have some things that you'd like to add to what Jason said in that previous episode, which, of course,

listeners should go back and listen to if they haven't already. Well, I mean, Henry, I'm just going to ventriloquise Jason's fantastic remarks on that episode. The short version is this. Folk. may have heard of the term Anthropocene, or allied ones like, I don't know, Plantationocene, phatocene, necrosein, there's a whole scene scene, but Capitalocene is the right one. And it is because it names a series of processes that are responsible for the transformation of the planet in a way that looks epochal, that is written into the stone of our era. So if you look at the signatures of what, you know, notionally appears as the Anthropocene,

things like, you know, radioactivity from nuclear weapons tests or plastic in the sea, or chicken bones. One of the things we pick on in the book is that there are trillions of chicken bones at the moment because of the billions of chickens that we go through every year. If you look at the fossil record for what it is that is the signature of what we're told as the Anthropocene, And in fact, the engine of all of that is capitalism. And it's really helpful to call it the capitalocene as opposed to something else. Because if you call it the capitalocene, you can fight it adequately.

You can recognize that there are proletarian movements. There are movements, there are civilizations that are not responsible for the destruction of the planet. And when you recognize that, you can recognize that there are comrades everywhere in a way that helps you just observe what it is. that is driving planetary destruction, but also that helps you understand the second part of the question you raised there, Henry, which is, well, so what's this world ecology thing? World ecology recognises that capitalism doesn't, you know, isn't associated with an ecology. It is an ecology. It is a way of mediating relationships in the web of life between the things that we call humans and the rest of the web of life, in ways.

that are, essentially we need to be understanding as a whole, you know, because one of the mistakes we often make and, you know, that's very, very often seen, even among our comrades on the left is to understand humans over here and nature over there. That's a mistake for, you know, every possible reason from a simple biological mistake, which is, you know, we just have to observe that humans are holobionts. We are beings. that are already embedded in the web of life. We have billions of creatures inside us that are not humans on our skins. We are part of an ecology.

And yet the naming of ourselves as separate from nature licenses a number of operations that are quite subtle, but then open the door to the kinds of exploitation of the rest of the web of life that capitalism's ecology is very good at. And if we start on the wrong foot, if we start by misnaming how it is that, capitalism's ecology is woven through us and is woven through the relationships of what we name as us, then we're on the wrong foot when we start to engage in the mobilizations we need to affect sustainable class struggle. So those are the big ideas here that actually if we start by repositioning ourselves as beings within the web of life and we understand that the sort of planetary collapse that we see are, in fact, part of the operations of capitalism,

not the plantation mentality or whatever, whatever these other sorts of mechanisms are. Then it's not merely being human that is driving the planet to disruption. It is capitalism itself. And the moment we are able to name that and also position ourselves as agents of struggle within it, the sooner we'll be able to move to hopefully a kind of socialism that's able to get us in better world ecological relations. Yeah, that's incredibly well said and passionately said, and that's a good summary and a good anchor for the rest of this conversation.

But I also want to do another anchor because we can't necessarily assume that every single person listening has read this book or is familiar with it. And I definitely want to give back to the distinction between nature and society, how that's reified through enlightenment thinkers. We'll definitely get there. But maybe as a way to help orient our audience, can one or both of you discuss the seven things that are entitled in the title of your book, sort of what they mean, how they're interconnected, and how you're analyzing broader trends within capitalism through the cheapness, and you might want to define that as well, of these seven things? Can we just begin by identifying that, and we say

this in the book, but nature is not a thing, but a dynamic of class, power, of cultural hegemony, of civilizing projects of the managerial outlook that seeks to turn other webs of relations, other webs of relations in the web of life, into profit-making opportunities. And that's really fundamental. As everyone who spent two weeks studying Marx will learn, there's something called commodity fetishism. So capitalism's drive to turn the deep and intimate relations of work and life into commodities that are then abstracted from those relations that went into their production. And part of what we're pointing out is that the logical and also historical and also historical condition for commodity fetishism is civilizational fetishism. It's a civilizing

project. And what the civilizing project from the first stirrings from Columbus, about whom we spent quite a bit of time in Seven Cheap Things, writing about from Columbus, there is the emergence of a civilizing project that creates the natural other, which is not simply the forest and the fields and the profitable plants that Columbus yearns for, but is also a powerful dynamic of domination in devaluation that culminates by the 1570s and in the century after in an audacious form of racism and sexism, at the core of which is naturalism. That is, if you think about the dominant languages of sexism and racism and other forms of domination, they are steeped in naturalism and naturalistic language. And so in this sense, nature becomes everything that

the capitalist don't want to pay for. And that's, I think, a really fundamental way of putting together both the modes of thought and the modes of political economy and the modes the devastating and devaluing transformations of the rest of life and their transformation into these, well, other six cheap things. But of course, they're always more than six. Yeah, absolutely. Now, Raj, maybe you want to jump in here in a second as well, but to kind of continue on as a little follow-up to that last question, you mentioned Columbus. Of course, Columbus plays an important role. he represents something sort of bigger than himself in this analysis, which you might want to touch on what does Columbus represent, you know, this connection between capitalism and colonialism is important here. And then you open up the book with an analysis of the chicken McNugget, which I find interesting as well. So can you kind of touch on the Columbus aspect and then what you're trying to say by opening up the text with the sort of liberal icon of the chicken McNugget? Sure. I mean, Columbus is sort of history's natural villain, and he was useful as we went through our seven cheap things. So, you know, the idea of cheap nature, labor, food, fuel, so energy, care, money and lives. Those seven things are all things about which we could tell us.

story that involved Columbus. So, you know, ripping pages from his diary, we see that one of the first things he says when he sees the new world is that he sees so many plants and animals and they could be great medicines and food. And the thing that gives him the greatest sorrow is that he does not know how much they are worth. And, you know, right there is a sort of an idea of, the idea that nature is cheap and available to be turned into the source of profit that Jason was mentioning just a second ago. But there are ways in which Columbus is also implicated in, you know, for example, the sugar trade. And Jason's written fantastic works on that from which we drew in our history of Madeira and the sugar industry. So if you look at the

history of Madeira, you find that early on Columbus was one of the captains of boats that trafficked between Madeira, this island that produced sugar for European nobility, and Genoa, where, which was a source of cheap money that allowed the circuits of capitalism to flow, or the circuits of capital to flow. You see that Columbus is someone who abducts women in order that they provide sort of comfort for the men who he also enslaves from the New World and brings back to Europe. You see that he's very interested in the idea of cheap care. he's interested in, again, cheap food, he's interested in energy. I mean, if you look at Madeira, he oversees and witnesses the turning of Madeira from an island of wood, right?

Ila do Madeira, you know, the island of wood, into a sort of smoking remnant of that, you know, within, how many years is it, 75 years, Jason? Perfect. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, everywhere you look at the dawn of capitalism, you see Columbus. He's sort of like an evil capitalist zealig. You know, he's just always there. So he's useful as we try and unfold the story of how capitalism works. And the story of the chicken nugget is pretty easy.

I'm sure on the show notes, we can just sling the two-minute and 30-second video that we developed that kind of pulls all this together. But basically the idea is that the modern chicken is one of the most capitalist objects. As we mentioned, there are billions of them alive now, but not for long. You know, from sort of egg to nugget, it's about 90 days. And the process through which this living being becomes a nugget is the sort of signature of cheap labor, of cheap nature of turning this thing, taking this thing as a profitable being. cheap labor where workers are paid next to nothing. In some cases, a story we found after we published the book was how workers in the U.S. in Oklahoma were diverted from prison if they

were part of the drug rehabilitation program into a chicken executive-sponsored drug treatment center. The treatment center was called Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery. And the idea was that instead of going to prison, these recovering addicts would, by day, pray to the good Lord Jesus and by night would work on the chicken production line because it was cheaper, you know, to do that and they wouldn't have to pay, oh sure, they wouldn't have to pay any sort of occupational health or safety. And I think this was a splendid reminder that the history that began with the conquest of the new world, with people working all day and praying to Jesus on Sunday, was just being inverted. But always it was the same dynamic of extracting the

labor from a created working class. So everything from cheap labor to cheap fuel. And we can follow all the other cheaps along the way. But again, understanding that the term cheap really refers to a strategy that capitalism has in order not to be able to pay its bills. And that's why there are trillions of chicken bones. That's why it's a signature of the capitalizing. And that's why the nugget is one of the most capitalist objects there is. And let's throw this in here too about the chicken. The chicken is itself a biotarian, if you will. The chicken itself is providing

work. But the cheapness is not just the economic moment, as we're saying, as Raj just laid out really beautifully, it's a moment of domination that combines with devaluation. And that is very, very fundamental when we begin to understand

the racialized and gender dynamics of class and capital in the web of life over the past five centuries. Nature is not an add-on. It's fundamental to the whole ideological architecture of political economy and works through a system of devaluation as well as the exploitation of labor and the appropriation of unpaid work. I think it's been touched upon a little bit, but it's probably worth going into a little bit more depth. You talk in your book about this distinction between nature and society and the fact

that's the kind of definition of society itself changed from its pre-modern meanings into a kind of modern total understanding of human social relations as apart from nature. And while we often think of this dichotomous and cinemas relationship of nature versus, you know, society or culture, it's something that's invented, it's something that has to develop. Perhaps you can explicate a little bit more about why something that seems like an abstract idea actually is so foundational and consequential. You know, you're materialists and you're doing a very materialist history, but yet concepts like this and distinctions intellectually that are being made form a really important part of this book. So I'm wondering if maybe you could, you know,

deepen, you know, the analysis for us from what you've said so far. and perhaps maybe even why ideas like this are actually so important in a materialist understanding of history and historical change. You want me to take a crack at? All right, so thinkers from Marx to Einstein to Audreelor basically say the same thing, that the thinking that created the crisis is not going to solve it.

And that's not just an idealist exercise in the sense of a history of ideas. It's a history of practical power. So let me give you a great example that Raj you brought into the book, which is the story we tell early on in the book about the Rick Caramento in 1513 of these armor-clad conquistadors, reading out this document to the indigenous people, saying, basically, we've come here to save you, we are here to deliver your salvation. You are unchristian, and the path to salvation is a path of hard work that for most of

view, as Raj points out, means death. And so this is a dynamic that is the kind of software of empire, if you will, this civilizing project of the Christian and the unchristian, of the civilized and the uncivilized, of the developed and the undeveloped. And this is something that capitalism can't dispense with. So every great era of capitalism has its own civilizing project. This reproduces in this ongoing churn these ruling abstractions that are really not just descriptions of the world that favor the rulers, but they're also guiding threads for empires. And you can think about it in successive turns of these Christianizing missions, the civilizing projects, whether it was the French or the British white man's burden or the

American manifest destiny. And then, of course, developmentalism with Truman's point four, program and its imperial anti-communism in the post-war era. So that's one dimension of how nature and society are quite bloody, quite practically involved in the long history of capitalism. Now, the other thing is that nature and society relate and emerge out of a Cartesian binary of thinking essences and extended essences. And this, is usually not talked about it, and Marxists totally ignore this point. This emerges, this way of thinking emerges during really one of the great waves of proletarianization and also of climate crisis and, oh, also of political revolt. Think about the French and English

Civil Wars, for instance, but not limited there. This gray moment of proletarianization and class struggle, what is that Descartes comes up with and really formalizes it is a boss's way of seeing the world. It is the manager who does all the thinking, and then everyone else, human, extra human, is an extended thing. So to think in terms of nature and society is simultaneously to think like an empire and to see like a boss. And that gives us a sense of the kind of software operating system of capitalist domination and exploitation, the political and cultural hegemony and the economic exploitation of this moment. And, of course, as Federici underlines,

this was an audacious moment of the formation of a gendered binary, intimately related to everything I just said, without which you couldn't have proletarians. That was why Federici is telling the story of the gendered primitive accumulation in the 16th and 17th century. You could not have enough proletarians without the forcible subordination of women. And something that we talk about, and this is really Raj's doing more than mine in this chapter on cheap care, which I think is a tour to force of how property and power and primitive accumulation in class

make necessary a particularly violent and oppressive regime of gender. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up because you did mention about that amazing moment of conquistadors speaking Spanish, giving basically a sermon, and that being considered. fair warning, right, for what they were then about to do. And several points throughout of the book, well, there's a great interest to me because I am a medieval historian looking at this kind of transition period and the way in particular in which crusade and crusading may have set up some of the structures that could then be recombined, you know, from the Mediterranean world into the Atlantic as, you know, you have, you know, new forms of colonization. But building upon

that previous heritage, is that the very same kinds of things troubled medieval canon lawyers about crucivade, about the fact that they had this desire to missionize and Christianize the world that came ideologically from, you know, the church that we should try and have, you know, Christianity spread throughout the world and was killing and slaughtering, you know, people with no real interest in their, you know, saving their souls, really the best way to go about it. And so it led to, and lawyers suggesting that crusade might be required or necessary once you had sent missionaries, if it didn't work, if they weren't allowed to, you know, freely preach because the, you know, Muslim sovereigns wouldn't allow them or it was too dangerous or something like that, then you could have a crusade in order to prepare for the Christianization. And so it seems like that kind of logic that you, you know, just were mentioning about the new. world expansion of Christianity through violence and the way in which that reinforced one another,

those ideas being the software for colonization, cheapening of lives and so on, builds upon this medieval history, but yet things do change. So that's a kind of interesting point to grasp what exactly changes. Is it the nexus of all of these other factors coming together? What do you think is different about what happens in the early modern period, you know, that ultimately transforms this global system from, you know, a feudal. I mean, so we often talk about the, you know, feudal to capitalism, but something, you know, something very interesting seems to emerge in the early modern period that has roots in the medieval. How do you see that transition taking place?

I mean, I think one way to understand the emergence of capitalism is as a response to the crisis in feudalism that is a multiple crisis of climate change, of the climate change rips off the facade of the sustainability of feudalism. And it all of a sudden makes clear that climate. more and more peasants onto a particular bit of land and hoping for increasing returns can only work when the weather is going to cooperate and when it stops doing that. And when the commoning systems that then people depend on are also undercut by the plague, you've got this multiple intersecting crises.

And what you then have are moments of peasant rebellion, again, at the beginning of the early modern period, in which the ruling class, to which the ruling class tries to respond by offering a couple of concessions, but then actually pining for the past. The ruling class doesn't head straight into capitalism. They want to re-peasantize, and peasants are having none of it. That moment, I think, is the fulcrum in which it's important to understand that then some of the early modern, some of the medieval practices, for example, like slavery, become mechanisms through which a certain kind of ruling class tips over into understanding that its position is going to be maintainable, not through the representization of their erstwhile serfs, but instead through a certain kind

of new mode of expansion. And this is made abundantly clear by the fact that actually it ends up being very profitable to engage in more imperial entanglements using the kind of slave labor that the medieval era has made available, and also some of the banking arrangements. I think, again, one of the things we spend quite some time thinking about in the book is this idea of cheap money, which now has come, again, to be quite a useful analytical tool, as we see that even though interest rates are high, certain banks are protected, certain depositing classes are being given money hand over fist. even though money is more expensive than it's been in ages.

So, again, the idea is to understand capitalism as one of us, I mean, as feudalism collapsed, there were lots of different experiments. Capitalism is the one that found the greatest success through the ruling class. And I think the thing to observe in what you're saying, I'm really curious about whether you agree here, is that the debates that you raise are debates around law and the state. And one of the things that's quite characteristic about this nature society divide is that there's always police there. And if we look at where the police are, we can understand what the contours of any given moment of society can be. Is it that Muslim slaves, for example, are part of society?

Absolutely not. And is it then in the new world that indigenous people are part of society? No. What is it that then has to happen but struggle? And it's really interesting to understand this nature society boundary, not as a typological thing that we sort of just work with and there it is. But we understand that as actually a boundary for class struggle. If you look at who it is then that fights through class struggle to enter society, we see fights around slavery. We see fights around the working class.

We see fights. In fact, the most recent and the fights that have taken the long. are fights around indigenous people's rights. And I think that's very interesting to understand because what you're talking about, Adnan, as far as I understand it, is the long history of the policing of the boundary between nature and society. Who gets counters natural and therefore beyond the pale and who is it that is admitted to society?

And that admission comes only through struggle. Yeah, that's a great way to put it and clarify, actually, what I was actually asking about, which is something that you do so well in this book is talking about these frontiers as really very important spaces and limits where these contestations can be really worked out and observed and where innovations have to take place because that's a fraught zone where you draw those boundaries and how they become contested because it opens up struggles. And so that's something I think that was very, very useful in this, you know, where boundaries

are drawn and where frontiers as geographical spaces, but also as these intellectual kind of boundaries and spaces where distinctions are drawn. So thank you. I think that really, really captures it. And that flows into my question pretty well. So in the book, you talk about this Vyadalid controversy where this boundary was debated between two different sides, Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Hines de Sepulveda. Apologies for pronunciation. I butcher every name, including my own. So, you know, native Spanish speakers don't yell at me too much. But in any case, we're talking about this divide between nature and society, and this fits in well within that debate. You know, they're discussing, are these humans?

Are these beasts? And I'll have you explain this controversy a little bit for the listeners who haven't read the book yet or aren't aware of this so-called controversy. But this is, again, looking at that divide between nature's society. And for me, a lot of this comes down to trying to push out things that we want to domineer over into the category of nature. By we, I'm talking about like, you know, this colonial or conquistador mentality. So by making this division, by making this duality between nature and society, we can say, okay, well, we're society. and of course we understand that society interacts with nature

but nature is something that's made to be dominated over as opposed to understanding that we are a part of nature like we're inextricably tied with nature nature is not what it currently is without us and we are not what we are without nature we're inextricably tied to one another this divide is for the purpose of domination and this divide by then categorizing people as human or beast

and these debates that take place, you know, human beast, by the people that are trying to push them into the category of beast, thereby removing them from society, or saying that, you know, they maybe be able to be reformed, but right now they're out of society. You're still putting them into the position where you can dominate them using this logic of this duality, one side that is meant to dominate and shape the world to its needs.

And the other side, which is simply there, It's simply there to be shaped to the needs of the more, you know, sentient or higher beings of the planet. So the question, I guess, is, you know, can one of you explain this controversy a little bit for the listeners and then, you know, perhaps dive a little bit deeper into this? You know, do you think that there is this logic of domination inherent to trying to create this divide? Because for me, it seems very obvious that this is the point, but I am not nearly as smart as anybody else here. So what seems obvious to me might just be wrong. So there are so many things going on here. And what you reference is a famous debate at valid delete, which is where the king held court.

Before Madrid, it was valid to lead. And the king in question was Charles V. He was about to abdicate to his son, Philip the second, who's a much more interesting figure in terms of the history of modernity. But in any event, this occurs right as the great genocide. really became obvious. And so the debate was really not as such a debate over whether indigenous peoples were beasts or humans or somewhere in between, to what degree could they be civilized. But the question was, how are we going to deal with the labor problem in the new world, which was becoming manifest at this time? Let me clear out a little bit of the end of

of Russia. And at some point, I went to hand up this discussion to Rush. But dominant in the way that we have learned to think about the invasion of the new world is the thesis to assess you with Alfred W. Crosby, which says basically all the indigenous peoples died because of their immune systems and bad microbes from the old world. It's called the virgin soil epidemic. It's been around for 50 years. And I like to summarize it from the standpoint of the empires as the thesis, the It says, oops, all the Indians died, not our fault. But it turns out maybe not 100% their fault because virgin soil epidemic so-called will kill 25, 30, 35% of a population. But not 90% to 95%.

That's 50 million human beings. Why was the invasion so lethal? Well, there were deliberate labor mobilization strategies which sought to re-concentr, indigenous peoples into villages called reductions. They were to be pacified, a term that was coined by the Jesuits in Brazil, pacified, of course, by military means,

and they were to be Christianized that indigenous peoples could be captured as slaves through a principle of just war, which does indeed have important connections with the Crusades several centuries prior. So this was not a problem of abstract colonialism were abstract microbes. And I say that because both of those interpretations

of what happened in the past are very much with us today. Oh, where did the pandemic come from? It came from nature. Oh, why were all the indigenous people killed and impressed? It was because of colonialism. Well, colonialism, imperialism is how capitalists want to organize the class struggle to do what? To get a hold of enough labor power and enough extrahuman sources of wealth, of energy, raw materials, food to make the whole engine of capital accumulation go. And that's what this famous debate of Valaddelead in 1550 to 1551 was about the contradictions of the labor population crisis in the new world. And Las Casas, to his credit, make claims that the indigenous peoples, yes, they were human, they could be Christianized,

they could be civilized, very dangerous ideas. So when about 20 years later, the Viceroy Toledo went to Potocity to reorganize the silver mines, one of the first things he did in order to make sure that he could mobilize enough labor power was, amongst other things, ban the ridings of Las Casas. Because this was a debate not just about the civilizing project, not just about who was part of nature and civilization, but fundamentally, this was a question of primitive accumulation of class war. And we have to be able to make sense of that from the beginning.

Otherwise, we end up with these banal invocations of, well, it was colonialism, and then people don't want to talk about capitalism. Or they give it lip service, but they pretend that colonialism is some metaphysical will to power. It's not. It's about how the bourgeoisie wants to organize the conditions of production, especially labor power. One quick thing before I let you hop in on that, Raj. before Brett asks his question. Jason, you mentioned how did the pandemic start?

It comes from nature. This is just an interesting aside for me, and perhaps some listeners may find it interesting. So some of the listeners probably remember that my background is in immunobiology. I'm not a historian like Adnan and like you are lovely guests. But there's a concept that's coming up in popularity in the last, probably in the last 10 years, really.

It's been becoming more and more in vogue called one, health. And I find one health to be a very useful concept because prior to the conceptualization and widespread acceptance of one health, we did see a duality within public health thinking as well in terms of human and nature. So when we were thinking about how do human, how do diseases enter the human population, we would pose it as, okay, is this a disease that spread simply between people or is this a zoonotic illness that goes animal to person? So again, we, we, We see this duality of, you know, this higher sentient being, and it is being impacted by some, you know, lower being that's completely separate from it.

One health throws in a third axis into this, which is the ecosystem. So the easy way of thinking about what is one help is human, animal ecosystem interface and how all of these things relate with one another. How do humans impact animal populations, how do animal populations and the diseases that they carry impact humans, but also how do humans impact the ecosystem? How do those ecosystem changes? Degradations of the ecosystem, deforestation, impact animal populations that are within those ecosystems, push them into more contact with people. How do changes within migration patterns, for example, due to the warming climate in many parts of the world, change interactions between humans and animals at these border regions of the ecosystem? How to encroachment informally, you know, animal, heavily animal. areas of the ecosystem by humans, it changed the interactions between humans and animals

and the spread of disease from human to animal and animal to human. How does pollution push these animals from different parts of the ecosystem into more human, again, human-centric locations? It's not a perfect conception, but it does break free of that constraint of seeing it as solely a human-based, health problem or zoonotic. It's animal to human or human to animal. And it's just this, you know, back and forth between these two sides without conceiving

how do humans impact the environment, the ecosystem, which really is basically everything, in a way that then influences the relations between humans and animals. It kind of starts to tear down that wall of human versus animal, you know, society versus nature. Of course, ecosystem could still be construed as nature, but by adding another dimension into this, another axis, it does become more of a wheel that you can kind of play with rather than just seeing it as a linear back and forth between two opposing sides. Anyway, that's my digression. Raj, feel free to go back to what we were talking about before. Sorry, this is very short. Raj, sorry, did it start to get into a step on your legal guidance here. But this,

what you just said is perfect. One health. Of course, you have people like Rob Wallace and Luke Bergman very much in conversation with world ecology. But let me point out this actually matters for socialist debate around the origins of COVID and pandemic policy that all of these Nature Society duelists like Mike Davis, who I love, God rests in struggle, comrade, Andreas Malm, said, oh, it comes out of nature. Well, there's a debate to be had over virology, gain of function research, lab leak hypotheses, which entail a very different kinds of politics around all of this. And one of the things the world ecology does is not deny something like zoonotic sources of disease, but also points out, you know, if you're running

bio-weapons labs and birology gain a function research, they're going to be lab leaks. There are lab leaks from everywhere. And that we can't just blame it on some Chinese wet market. So there are real differences that have been, I think, suppressed on the left. And world ecology brings those back to the surface. Yeah. And just to reiterate, I'm sorry again, Raj, to step on you, but there have been lab leaks. That's not to say that COVID itself was a result of a lab leak, that the data is still very much out on that. And, you know, more of the data still shows that it's more likely to be coming from a more quote-unquote natural origin. But the data is still inconclusive on that.

But those sounds like shifting. Yeah. Yeah. There have been numerous documented examples of lab leaks of other pathogens in multiple countries. I know that I covered about a year and a half ago a different lab leak that took place in China about a year before the COVID pandemic began. It was a bacterial-based leak. But, you know, basically what happened is they forgot to put the filter in and they pumped the spores of the bacteria into the nearby town and infected hundreds of feeble. So, you know, this is something that can happen.

and you're absolutely right that we shouldn't only be thinking of human health and animal health and then how do they impact each other, but also the politics is another thing, politics and human actions that are outside of the individual's health that would impact how those things work. Anyway, sorry, Raj. No, no, no, I'm fact, we're all stepping on Brett. So I'm going to, I'm going to shop while Brett asks the next question. Yeah, don't you dare tread on me. I just wanted to make a point Adnan went into the past

to make this point about nature versus society and this dualism you were talking earlier Jason about the thinking substance and the extended substance and I think one of the ways that this sort of assumption built into our culture here in the West

is reaching extreme logical extension is in the advocates of artificial intelligence transhumanism the idea that you can download your consciousness, the idea of the singularity, these all seem like things that are stemmed, are rooted in this conceptual division and this attempt to want to dominate nature and completely leave behind nature altogether, including in some of these more extreme

examples, our own natural organic selves, to eradicate that entire side of the equation and to fall ahead first willingly into technology and be eradicated within it. I think it's sort of nihilistic, but I think it stems from this Cartesian dualism, And another way that this operates, I think, in our modern discourse is around the issue of frontiers, around the issue of the earth is trashed, let's move to Mars, let's terraform Mars. We have to get out of here as soon as possible. In both instances, these live issues in our discussions and the rhetoric that we're all immersed in, it's this sort of pathological need on some people's, you know, on some people's behest to extricate ourselves from nature's limits entirely. And I think those things can be reasonably seen as extreme morbid extensions of this Cartesian dualism. So I'm kind of wondering your thoughts on that, as well as the broader role that frontiers play in the development of colonial capitalism. All right, Brett. I mean, I think you've got your finger on lots of different threads there. And I'm going to try and pull them together because I think they're all totally fascinating.

Maybe I'll jump off where you, you know, the line don't tread on me. I live in Texas, as Henry noticed at the beginning. And, you know, we've got people here like Joe Rogan, whose podcast, no one here should be listening to, but also, you know, fucking Elon Musk. Musk is just, you know, he's fucking, he's today's Columbus, isn't he? I mean, he's quite happy to get cheap money. I mean, you know, he's made his money from Tesla through government funds

subsidized loans, all the rest of it. He's cheap labor, obviously, the racist exploitation of labor that he's been involved in is all over the place. We could go through all the cheaps and find his fingerprints everywhere. But he is a frontiersman in the sense that he's very interested, as all capitalists are, in finding this new boundary to engage in primitive accumulation, whatever that is. Now, the most obvious one is, yes, he wants to colonize Mars, and he's quite interested. in that kind of colonization. But, you know, he's also the guy who tweeted when someone pointed out that the lithium

from, you know, that was required for his batteries came from Bolivia, tweeted, we will coo who we want when there was a coup that seemed to be just a natural, you know, natural resources grab there. What I find interesting about this idea of the frontier is precisely that it is at the same time as appearing to be interesting, innovative ways of finding new ways to not pay your bills. It depends on some very old

kinds of capitalist infrastructure. One of the ideas that appears in the book quite often is that every sort of frontier has its farm and its mine and its bank and its forest, right?

There are sources of energy and sources of rural material. and food and cheap labor from which, you know, the supporting infrastructure for these new innovations at the frontier happen. And these frontiers are sites of, you know, remarkable innovation, you know, and also remarkable interactions between humans and the rest of the web of life. And that gets us into the non-COVID disease story here. I mean, I'm with Rob Wallace in thinking that, you know, actually, there are reasons to be a bit worried about the One Health

paradigm because the thing that it doesn't include is capitalism. Rob talks, for example, about how one of the stories about the origins of HIV is actually a story about neoliberal deforestation. If you look at the forces that drive people into eating monkeys for bushmeat, for example, and having interactions with primates. that have simian immunodeficiency virus, which appears to be the origins of human immunodeficiency virus, and I'm not wrong in thinking that, I don't think.

If you look at the stories of where those interactions happen, these aren't, I mean, although initially we were told, oh, yes, these were African shagging monkeys. In fact, the stories are much more about loggers being exposed to brutal conditions and not having enough to eat and then trapping, being exposed to diseased animals and having to eat them. And these end up

being the more plausible sources for the HIV-AIDS virus that then gets reconstituted as a racist disease or a disease that's only about queer people. And again, you know, this gets back to the boundary of like what is society? Our queer's part of society? Our Africans part of society. You know,

these racist and homophobic tropes around the division between society and nature are still very much this is the 1980s we're talking with the present they we're talking about

but again the vector in these frontiers is the drive for profit and accumulation and the exploitation of the working class

so I just wanted to observe there Brett that when we're thinking about the singularity when we're thinking about Elon Musk's high hopes

in every sense we're also talking about the classic the classic figure of the modern-day Columbus, who's dependent on some very old capitalist infrastructure so that he can make new money in what appears to be machines that complete your sentences. But in fact, the sentence is always completed by capital. And Frontiers just simply are how capitalism fixes its crises.

And we can see this quite concretely. Since we're on the topic of technology, I'm reminded of another departed. comrade David Graber, rest and struggle of where are all the flying cars? But he makes an elementary point that has since been reinforced by people like Jason Smith and Aaron Bonanov and others that the past 50 years have been an era of unprecedented technological stagnation. If you contrast the era of, let's say, 1870 to 1970 with 1970 to 2020 or even the 50-year peer grades, you can see that technology, yes, in information and communications technologies

have as advanced with essentially on a 1960s model. And that what we are seeding is, in fact, an epical stagnation of labor productivity growth, an epicile acceleration of agricultural productivity growth in the capitalist model of agriculture. Of course, climate change is implicated, but that's not the only one. And overall, a profound stagnation in capital accumulation. There's a great stagnation, all of which is adding up in the era of the absence of frontiers of cheap nature to a great implosion of the capitalist model.

And what happens? Well, I think we're seeing a replay on a magnificent and horrific scale of the pre-World War I situation, where Lenin said basically this, the empires have carved up the whole world, and now they're going to go to war with each other. What are we seeing now? We're seeing a war over Belt and Road in Ukraine between basically China and Russia with the support of the global south and a Euro-American condominium. And we can come down on whatever assessment we want, but that is an end of cheap nature war. It is a war of redivision. And I think it's a sign that capitalism and the absence of frontiers is in its zombie phase and that we are confronted with what Samir Amin once clarified is a choice between a decadent transatlantic. and a revolutionary transition, that it is one from below or from above? Well, I really actually want to follow up on that because you had some interesting things in the conclusion. But before we get there, from what you just said, before we get there, I feel like maybe it would be worth talking about a couple of the other cheap things that are very significant and how you're analyzing this history. And one is work. And one thing I loved about this chapter and your discussions there is the way in which you restore a distinction that Marx makes

that a lot of people really don't think that much about, about why he talks about labor, human labor power as different from labor, right? Like the, you know, one is a natural force, he says. And people don't often always, you know, really think about that, but that's fundamental to your analysis there and in re-embedding the way work is part of nature and nature itself provides all kinds of use values, it is working, and that there's something particular about the way in which capitalism tries to organize labor so that it can get the most work possible for the least price. And that isn't only about the exploitation of human labor power. but is also about the way it engages nature.

I wonder if you could maybe tell us a little bit more about this point. Well, so the chicken is a biotarian as well. So capitalism is not only a system of socially necessary labor time, as we learn from Marx, but it's also, and I think this is one of the undercurrents of the book that's really front and center at some moments, is a capitalism as a system of socially necessary unpaid work. and that is both the Femeteriate, the unpaid, largely feminized, but not in a biological sense, feminized in that sense of naturalized work of human beings, and the unpaid work of nature as a whole. And that's really a fundamental to what we're doing.

A lot of ego-socialists talk about something called metabolism and never point out what Marx actually helps us think better than anyone else, which is that the labor process, whether it is paid or unpaid, is a metabolism. And Mart's talks that uses this language. It is social and natural at the same time that climate conditions are both a producer of a capitalism and class society, but are also produced those and other natural conditions, are also produced and transformed. And so this gives us a much more robust, I think, analytical way to understand. in the transformation of capitalism and its limits today, but also, as Raj was saying at the beginning, in analytics for what I call, and maybe it's fanciful, I don't know, the planetary

proletariat. It recognizes the work is always semi-proletarianized, and it relies on the unpaid work of humans and the rest of nature, the biotariat and feminitarian, not as separate categories, of course, but as a churn as a maelstrom of forms of socially necessary paid labor and socially necessary unpaid work. And for that, that brings us out of capitalism separated from the web of life. It also takes us out of economism separated from politics because what makes possible unpaid work above all? It is relations of domination, coercion, law policing. I think, Henry, you have a question about

care from work, which I think really picks up on this distinction that you were just getting at, Jason. Yeah, absolutely. So as we listed the seven cheap things that were spelled out within the book, two that might catch some listeners by surprise, perhaps, are work and care, and specifically in terms of the fact that they are separated from one another. And in the book, you kind of lay out why this is the case, but for the listeners who haven't yet read the book, and again, I'm highly recommending that they pick it up and do, why are you splitting care from work? Whereas we We would like to, many times, you know, put these together into one category of labor.

Well, I mean, we're drawing on Sylvia Federici's work here, but also March, right? I mean, we're drawing on the idea of reproductive labor, the kind of labor that is required in order to produce the proletariat, but which is, which capitalists don't particularly want to pay for. And the idea that care work, as Jason was mentioning before, is feminized. Is itself a production of capitalism? You know, we observe, for example, that the household itself is manufactured, that is a legal creation in what we termed the great domestication. A really interesting period in history where women, women's rights are curtailed very systematically. And where the juridical concept of women doesn't

exist, it is invented. So in, for example, in the colonization of Nigeria, the idea of the juridical woman is something that the British have to import in order to be able to then manufacture the household and then naturalize these distinctions between men and women. everywhere that colonialism goes, well, colonial capitalism goes, and colonialism obviously predates capitalism, we're here just talking about this sort of particularly interesting, again, advance of the frontier of capitalism through, in this case, empire. There is a lot of juridical work that goes into creating the work of care as a kind of reproduction, a kind of metabolism that cannot, should not be. thought of as work at all. And that, that, you know, again, this is thinking

like a boss. I really like that idea, Jason, yes, what does it float like a, no, what like an... Flood like a butterfly, sting like a me, like a boss. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I just love the idea that in fact,

you know, what boss wants to pay you to go look after your kid or take you, you know, go to the hospital, whatever it is, that, that stuff is not in any capitalist interest to be able to pay for. And insofar as that work is considered different from the work of pay proletarian work. That is a success of capitalism in creating in our minds the divide between work and care. And if you look at the structure of the book, too, that we are in a sense building to this crescendo of an argument that extra economic

forms of devaluation and domination. Or in fact, what's central about capitalism and allowing for all the economic miracles of capital accumulation to occur? So we build towards that argument about care and lives towards the end, I think, in a way that really emphasizes that where we were going all along was the synthesis of paid work and unpaid work of domination and exploitation. And that's what's missing on the left these days. That's what's missing in this sort of woke race reductionist.

a moment that the left has abandoned the critique of exploitation. And instead of saying, well, it's a combination of exploitation and domination, we're saying, no, wait a minute, these two fit together. You can't explain the two without putting them together. And oh, by the way, they all involve the web of life, not just as a material reality, but as that dynamic of naturalization, like you were saying, Raj, the woman had to be invented as a fetish out of what kind of raw material, out of nature as this other sort of fantasy imagination. I mean, go back to Shakespeare and Taming of the Shrew or that image of the wild, unruly, savage woman, right?

Yeah, just a quick question then before Brett goes in. So I think many of the listeners are probably really enjoying the conversation, but maybe they want to know a little bit more about the specific case studies that you use within here. So you've mentioned Madeira already during the, conversation. We talked about the controversy of Vyadalid, but we also, of course, talked about Columbus and how he's related to many of these different case studies that are through the story. But perhaps some of the listeners are wondering, okay, so we have a history of the world, what are some of the case studies that are present within this book, and how do we use

these seven cheap things to explain what happened, why it happened, and, uh, how these processes were what drove this historical event. So I'm not asking for like a list of all of the things in the book, but, you know, just a couple to tease the listeners, get them, you know, excited to dig in because I know for many listeners like me, they really do like these kind of case studies to see how these conceptual things really fit within reading history and then being able to then take those examples and apply the concepts to when we read about other historical events outside of the book. I mean, there's too many to mention, but one of them... That's exactly why I said, I don't want a list, Josh. No list. Just give me a few. So, I mean, you know, for example, in thinking about energy, right, and thinking about cheap coal, for instance, one of the stories we tell is about rebellion and class struggle with coal miners. And I think that's really useful right now if we're thinking about climate change, for instance, when thinking about, well, look, where are the frontiers of class struggle that are really interesting and important right now? It is precisely in the connection between, you know, oil workers, workers in the fossil fuel industry, plus workers in the new, you know, in the lithium mines, plus the struggle that is happening in rare earth metals.

and communities being forced to mine those worldwide, there is the possibility not only of solidarity, but also the very real connections that, for example, that link longshore workers that prevent certain kinds of commodities being unloaded in one place and another. Because, again, this is a very material analysis of the vectors of, in this case, cheap energy, that keep the wheels that keep capital flowing that keep capitalists rich but in every case

you see the frontier of class struggle so in order for the capitalists to be able to substitute labor with energy you still need labor and those workers are in one of the examples we use in the book actually really at the fulcrum of being able to resist

and transform what capitalism is and what it might be afterwards and Rajroy is a really great piece about a year ago after the flare up of the need of Russia war in Ukraine about rising food prices and social volatility and potential social unrest across the global south. I quoted this in an essay I wrote it on imperialism at the end of cheap nature, that one of the insights from the book, and this fits together with where we've gone so far in this conversation, is that the nexus of food, cheap food, of social reproduction, gender care work.

are all fitting together at pivotal moments in the history of capitalism. We point out two of those, the history of the French Revolution in which women leading red, petty bourgeois and especially proletarian women leading red riots is fundamental. And again, in the Russian Revolution. And, of course, we know the history of the Arab Spring and other moments in the history of capitalism. That's come into play the bad. And Raj is written brilliantly with Phil McMichael on the return of the moral economy of the crowd and the political economy of the food riot.

These are indispensable contributions. So when we're thinking about the weak links of capitalism and class struggle, it is almost a strategic priority to link the point of production struggles, Rajah, you highlighted with the social reproduction struggles over the right to food. That I think that puts the other production and reproduction, paid work and unpaid work. And one of the most dangerous ideas to the country. capitalist imaginary, the right to subsistence, which of course takes us back to the era of

Maltus and the era of the moral economy of the crowd in England and the French Revolution. So again, when we think about what is the political, strategic importance of some of these world ecology formulations, it is precisely that to put together the questions of biophysical and social life and the weak links of the capitalist chain, especially in social reproduction and unpaid care work. Yeah, so I have a question, and we've certainly touched on some aspects of this. Maybe we can touch on a few more, which is around today's crisis in these seven things that is driving a lot of the political tumult that we see globally at the moment. Jason said earlier that frontiers, I'm paraphrasing, our capital's way of sort of evading or escaping its own crises. The possibility for frontiers have maybe diminished, but there's the territorial redivision that they're being fought over today, as you mentioned. I can see, And I might be wrong about some of these things, but, you know, cheap labor, right? This need for cheap labor, it resulted in part in NAFTA here in the United States and the need to get away from union workers in the United States, displaced jobs elsewhere.

That created the Rust Belt. That creates the base from which Trump eventually arose. We see a lot on the reactionary right today of this hysteria, anti-feminist hysteria, anti-LGBQ hysteria. and I think if I thought about it deeper, maybe I could draw some connections to a crisis in cheap care and the need to reestablish firm binaries to put women back in their place and anything that starts to blur those lines is a threat to that. Certainly cheap money. We're seeing that at the end of the era of insanely cheap money. So all these things are sort of happening at once and that's creating a crisis. I was wondering if maybe both or one of you could point to maybe some other crises that are currently happening in these seven. things and how they're driving the political tumour experiencing. Sure. Well, actually, I mean, I think

one of the things to look at and I was really provoked, when we were writing this, you know, the conclusion, I was really moved by something that Jason was pointing out that it mentioned earlier on this conversation that yes, that there's an echo here

of some fairly frightening times in the past as well, that there are, you know, there's no reason to think that capitalism is going to prevail. And there are reasons for concern that whether our decline is decadent or revolutionary, that actually decadence appears more likely at the moment, and then a decadent decline into what? You know, we're good enough historians to know that fascism is never really far away.

And that was, you know, we wrote this book when, you know, we wrote this book when, you know, know, the rise of Trump was, so, you know, I mean, it was there, but the sort of full-throated roar of American fascism hadn't yet been heard. And I worry a lot about fascism, not just in the United States, but around the world. I mean, you know, Narendra Modi was a fascist, even before we wrote this book, and I think we may have thrown, lobbed the word fascism at him just because it's technically correct and also the right thing to do when talking about the Rendamuti. But the rise of these kinds of crisis

and the rise of the failure of capitalism to be able to meet this crisis is spawning a range of alternatives and fascism is one of them. I was troubled to see that in the Amazon list of best-selling food and agriculture books, is a book called The Eggs Benedict Option, which references another right-wing term called the Benedict option, but the Eggs Benedict Option is actually a foodie book for right-wingers.

The author is a guy called, or someone called Red, was it a Red Nation or something. It's a raw egg nationalist is his name or their name. It reads like a bloke, so I'm going to call him he. But, yeah, raw egg nationalist has a really interesting sort of tour through the food system where he doesn't, you know, he quotes Michael Pollan and he quotes our comrade Tom Philpott, pointing out how industrial capital has been a sort of succubus on the face of the food system. We've been poisoned by these corporations for their profit. But this guy, a raw egg nationalist, then says, well, you know, corporate international capital, I mean, we're talking about the Jews here. And it makes this turn into an understanding of multinational capitalism as coded in a particularly racist way and then offers an alternative that is about a retreat to, you know, what we need is to homest again and what we need is sort of a blood and soil nationalism that takes the food system seriously, that actually helps us address and close some of these metabolic loops. And, you've got fascists taking the, you know, the crisis that we're in very seriously.

When you have eco-nationalists or eco-fascists gunning down people, again, here in Texas in El Paso, because the people coming across the border were taking our stuff. That was in the manifest of the El Paso shooter when he opened fire in Walmart. There's a real sense here of themes that you've covered in previous. episodes of this podcast, right? It's all crises of nationalism, crises of whiteness, and crisis of masculinity, and at the same time, an understanding from the fascists that this is something, the climate crisis is something that is serious, that needs to be addressed, and they address it in fascist ways. So I'm quite worried about where it is that we find

ourselves, because, as you say, we wrote this book as a sort of observation that each of these seven cheap things we're heading towards crisis. The crisis are only intensified. And the movements for socialism that we see are certainly sort of building strength, and we can talk about that. But the fascists have also been, you know, are aware of the crises. And I'm concerned that they're making strides too. I'm much more concerned about centrist liberalism and where it's going, especially the uneasy condominium between, on the one hand, the unipolar world government fantasies of the Pentagon and Washington, D.C., in an uneasy alignment with a kind of green techno-surveillance authoritarian capitalism in our post-capitalist vision in many ways

on offer by the Davis Project at the World Economic Forum. And looking at the ways in which the political contradictions, especially in the imperialist countries, are unfolding, the centrist liberals have been much more warmongering and much more dystopian in terms of ramping up the deep states participation in the, as we know, platform capitalism from the Twitter files, the repression of so-called misinformation of absolutely frightening. You see Trudeau who comes out of the stable of Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum, invoking anti-terror legislation in order to suppress dissent. Were the truckers in bed with right-wingers? Okay. We're, we're engaged in terrorism? No, absolutely not. And so what we see here, I mean, in contrasting Trump and Biden, we should be clear, Trump, lots of negative things to say about Trump, but not starting a new war is a good thing. Democrats love to start new wars. And Biden, along with, let's look at the other centrist liberal bloc that's driving us to the precipice of nuclear war, the Greens with the Social Democrats in Germany.

And so here we're seeing the pathologies of the end of cheap nature where the U.S. is blowing up Nord Stream 2 in order to do what, it's about more than this. One, to keep them away from the Russians and two, to sell them natural gas through the retooled Hamburg port. And so this is not a cheap nature strategy anymore. This is a kind of post-capitalist strategy for some kind of world order, the contours of which remain to be seen. I think it's all wildly unstable because Belt and Road has basically the entire global south behind it, including the Saudis. I mean, the Saudis of all people are now taking a full seat on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. They're doing this out of recognition that the best deal in a post-capitalist transition is going to come from the Chinese and now from the Americans. What are the Americans out?

They have the guns. And, of course, Afriqom has run out of Germany. So let's say, and then you have these weird things like, Raj, I'm sure this stunned you as well. People like Matt Gates, all right, deeply, deeply right-wing problematic figure. He's the only one in Congress who gets up and says, you know, pull the armies out of Africa, pull the U.S. Special Ops out of Africa. So we're in this.

I want to bring all this up because there are new tensions and contradictions, especially in the imperialist countries, between an anti-imperialist right and an anti-imperialist left. Those are not easy to navigate. I don't pretend that they will, but they have to be made a good. against the dystopian forces of centrist liberalism, which I see is trying to engineer a post-capitalist transition in frankly a really dystopian way. I mean, re-caused Schwab.

I mean, that shit, that's bad shit crazy. And that leads so well into this sort of concluding question I want to ask, and it's to draw us from both of your responses right there, because I think Raj pointed out the trajectory of sort of far right-wing barbarism that's emerging. And then you, Jason, pointed out this centrist, decadent, transition if, for lack of a better word, maybe, the state surveillance, post-capitalist, but top-down elite, you know, solidifying its control, both real threats and real possible

trajectories. But, you know, we should also end on, as your book sort of does, on a positive possibility. I think the concept you use is reparation ecology and the sort of, as a concept and the positive vision of what could happen that comes out of that. So as a sort of way to wrap up this wonderful discussion, can you kind of touch on what you mean? by reparation ecology and just the outlines of that possible trajectory as well. Well, I mean, movements have been fighting this since there have been movements, right? I mean, since there's been the possibility of class struggle. And, you know, I mean, it didn't take Marx to come along to, for folk to realize that they

were being exploited for their labor. There's lots of pre-Marx, you know, pre-Marx's understanding of, particularly from indigenous communities, about the fact that they were being used for work and that's how they were going to resist. So I'm given some sort of pause by the idea that there are movements defending the Commons in one way or another around the world. And I think that that's quite useful because as certainly as I understand the Commons and a lot of these movements understand it, these are spaces of communism. These are spaces in which it is possible both to access

I mean in which unalienated labor happens but also they do so by accessing the state

in certain ways and they make the state behave better in those moments of engagement I'm thinking

for example of the MST in Brazil that was able to get even for a while the Bolsonaro state

to give to pay more for the food that was grown on occupied land, but if particularly it was grown agroecologically and then feed it to children. And on those settlements, the kinds of activism and the kinds of organizing that happens

strikes me as being incredibly powerful. But, you know, not everywhere has the great fortune of having Brazil's land laws, which allow for the occupation of land without being killed. And even there, they are being killed. So, you know, I do think that there are a number of movements around the world that are incredibly exciting, that offer moments of being able to make claims on the state and organize to be able to, you know, to transform the state. But I'm, you know, I think that that's the sort of hope of reparative ecology is a kind of post-capitalist connection that recognizes the damage of the past. And, you know, and the reason we had to put reparation in there is otherwise you've got a bunch of grain saying, yes, we, you know,

we'll just sort of have the Green New Deal and everything's going to be great. And we'll just sort of, you know, hold hands and kumbaya and we'll forget about the global south. But in fact, the importance of reparation there is precisely to recognize the damage the damage it and rebuild in a way that the threads that together. We've got Max Isles, a fantastic people green new deal as a sort of template for that. But the activism and the organizing, I think, is tremendously important. It is happening. And I'm excited for us to, you know, to, I'm certainly the project I'm working at the moment is engaging. is with a number of the movements that I've just mentioned

and we mentioned in the book that are precisely interested in both making claims on the state and so not retreating into some sort of anarchist world, but also recognizing that there is a value in defending the commons, particularly in this moment

of really aggressive, you know, fascist, stroke, liberal policing of those commons. And I think to that extent, Jason, you know, we're worried about similar things from different ends. But I don't think that there's, you know, you can draw the continuum between Klaus Schwab and Narendra Modi very easily because they, you know, they press flesh together routinely.

Absolutely. And I think what, what Raj and I offer in this book just really quickly is that we foreground the anti-imperialist struggle and the need for internationalism against, I would say, some of the dominant trends within eco-socialist thought, which tell us that the problem started with fossil fuel and steam engine in England, or tell us that. us that we need to blow up pipelines. Pipelines could be rebuilt. What we need to concentrate on are the pipelines of imperial power and

capital, which is what we provide an actual theory of and a history of with cheap money and cheap war and all the rest. So that's I think where Max Ile and others, there's an emerging counter tendency to a kind of eco-socialism that's soft

on imperialism. I think that goes from much of deep growth. I think it goes a bunch of the Green New Deal. There are exceptions in both. But the centrality of international solidarity and anti-imperial struggle is really in the web of life as fundamental to what we're doing. Yeah. Just as a funniest side, listeners, we're recording this on May 2nd. And the reason that I say that is because this will be coming out in a couple of weeks from now. But just about two days ago, Raj, you mentioned the MST in Brazil.

The New York Times just put out an article about two days ago titled, If you don't use your land, these Marxists may take it. And of course, this is talking about the landlissler workers movement in Brazil, the MST, a laughable headline, a very fearmongering piece. And of course, you know, do you expect anything different from the imperial stenographers at the New York Times? Of course not. This is exactly what you expect to see from them. But it is very funny that the headline, you know, it's not even a snappy short headline. It's this full sentence if you don't use your land.

These Marxists may take it. Very funny. So I'm going to ask the fine. question to read us out now. And if you have anything that you want to say about that, you know, embarrassing article that just came out, you can also feel free to. The question is, Raj and Jason, how can the listeners find each of you in your work? And perhaps more interestingly, because I know that it's very easy to find both of you. What are you both working on right now? What can we expect to see from each of you in the near future? I know Raj, you also recently

had Inflamed come out with your co-author Rupa Maria. Great book. I've got it back home in the States. But yeah, what do we have coming out from each of you in the near future? I mean, I'm on the road with a documentary project called The Ants and the Grasshopper. And I'm, yeah, as I say, working on a project with the comrades in the global south predominantly looking at this defense of the commons and things. about the politics of care and reproduction in these social movements. So expect something on that in the next couple of years. But yeah, over the next year or so, I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the Global South with these comrades learning from them.

Thanks. I mean, two books. One is that climate crises are moments of political opportunity, and we can see this going back, in fact, thousands of years, that climate crises destabilize ruling classes and provide moments for the communist tendency to move to the fourth. This was true of the collapse of Rome. It was true in the crisis of feudalism. And we'll see it again. This is a real moment of opportunity. And then another is an unpacking of planetary managerialism

in the history of the eco-industrial complex, including the climate industrial and academic complex and the complicity of the universities in capitalogenic climate change. So we need to really concedes the means of mental production as much as anything these days. Well, I'm sure I speak for Adnan and Britt. When I say to each of you, one, we really enjoyed the conversation.

I had a great time. Honestly, they could go a lot longer, but we'll save some more of these things for when each of those projects come out. The second thing I would like to say is when you have drafts of these projects, sneak on my way, and I'll make sure that we're able to, you know, get together for more conversations in the future for each of these projects. I know that, like I said, I speak for Adnan and Brett, I'm sure when I say that we'd like to have conversations around each of these projects that you're both coming up with in the near future. So thank you very much again. Listeners, our guests were Rosh Patel and Jason W. Moore. The book that we were talking about is the history of the world in seven cheap things, a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet.

You need to pick it up and read it, really. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast? Well, they can find me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, and you can also check out my other podcast about the Middle East Islam of World Muslim diaspora culture called the M-H-L-L-I-S. It's on all the usual platforms, and I also just want to thank our guests so much. This was a very important book, one of the more exciting things I've read in a long time, and I'm looking very much forward to the future projects and continuing conversations, because as that last. question from Brett points out is that it's easy to be very despairing when you do this sort of analysis. But what I loved also is that there is really, you know, reasons to organize around these opportunities. So as we think through that, I look forward to hearing more about how we can

do that and see examples of how people are doing that. Absolutely vital. So I want to thank you both so much. Yeah. And I know, Adnan, you and I had that conversation with Ariel Saltzman about a year and a half ago where she brought up this book in the conversation and ironically it was on both yours and my to do list in terms of books

that we wanted to cover and her mentioning it in that conversation was kind of the impetus for starting to put this together she said she said she's a brilliant world historian and she said

when we asked her you know what she was working on she said well I just want to tell you about a book that I wish I had written Yeah, and that is, you know, Patel and war, history of the world and 17 things. So that was high praise as well. Absolutely. And of course, I recommend the listeners go back and check out that episode that we did with Dr. Saltzman on World Systems Theory.

Brett, how can the listeners find you in your other podcasts? You can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Raj, it was a real pleasure to meet you. Jason, you're a fan favor for a reason. Hope to have both of you back very, very soon. Keep up the amazing work, seriously. Thanks, Brett. Thanks, y'all.

Yep, absolutely open invitation. Listeners, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-N-N-N-N-N-N-E-C-K-1-9-5. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-R-A-U-L-A-U-L-A-U-S-P, and you can help support us and keep the lights on and keep the show running by going to Patreon.com forward-slash guerrilla history. again, Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.