Guerrilla History - National Liberation Struggles & the Agrarian Question w/ Max Ajl

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on a good comrade of ours, Max Ajl (much overdue, we might add)!  Here, we get a primer on the agrarian question and discuss its importance to national liberation struggles globally!  Max is the perfect guest for this conversation, and we know you'll get a lot out of it. Max Ajl is is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment, a researcher on decolonization, post-colonial planning, Arab dependency theory and food sovereignty at Ghent University, and the author of the outstanding A People's Green New Deal.  You can follow Max on twitter @maxajl.  Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember den, Ben, boo? 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 Huckimacki, joined as usual by

my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? Hi, Henry. I'm great. It's wonderful to be with you. Yeah, it's nice to see you as well. Also joined by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Happy to be here. Yeah, happy to see both of you again.

I know we just recorded two days ago, but I'm always really happy when we're all able to be here for an episode. We're also joined by an excellent guest to talk about a topic that I've actually been wanting to talk about for a while. We're joined by Max Ayle, who is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and is a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wanganian University, which I probably mispronounced, but. that's okay. Hello, Max. It's been a while since I've gotten to talk to you. I know Brett also has an episode with you on Rev Left about your book, People's Green New Deal. It's really nice to have you on the program. It's fantastic to be on the program also. And just a small clarification is that I'm now at Ghent University in Belgium. Oh, congratulations for the, you know, with the move. So the topic for today is the agrarian question and its importance to national

liberation struggles. And of course, we've talked about various national liberation struggles on the show before, but we have not really touched on the agrarian question much in general or in regards to these national liberation struggles. So as we get into the conversation, I think the first thing that we need to do, just in brief, because we do plan on having a full episode on the agrarian question at some point. Max, can you orient our listeners as to what the agrarian question is? I know that that has shifted over time in slightly different ways. There are various conceptions of the agrarian question.

It's not really like a question in particular rather than sets of questions that constitute a way of thinking about the economy within a country and even between countries. So can you just enlighten the listeners a little bit on what we're referring to when we talk about the agrarian question? The agrarian question is a conceptual frame or a framing device that we use to bring into focus the many social, political, economic, ecological, gender-based processes that are occurring in the spatial area that is not urban, that is in one way or another in the countryside. So there isn't like a meta thing that's beyond that.

It's a lens to bring those into a sharp view, particularly as a correction to historical overfocus on urban struggles and the forms of politics that are taking place in cities and in the struggle for state power and given that state organs, political organs, are historically situated in cities that, of course, lends an urban bias to a broad range of social and political inquiries. So the occurring question is essentially not just a framing device, but a reframing device and its contours and its parameters change over time depending on both what people wish to bring into focus and what they are capable of bringing into focus. So it actually expands in many ways over time as more struggles force different aspects of what's

going on in the countryside into broader attention. Just to hop in very quickly before I let you go and Brett with your follow-up, I just want to highlight. the fact that as Max lays out, this is a very complex set of relations. It's not a specific question. Oftentimes, if you just look online and you Google, you know, what is the agreeing question? You'll find something very, very simplified, like where does the surplus for industrialization come from?

Sure, this is a component of the agreeing question, but it's only a component of the agreeing question. And I appreciate Max for laying out these different threads that play into it. Anyway, Brett, go ahead. Yeah, so now that we have that basic idea, I'm wondering why has the agrarian question been so important for revolutionary movements in particular and so central to the history of Marxist and national liberation struggles in particular? Even when the agrarian question was originally being framed by Angos in Western Europe, there was an urgent political question of how should primarily or initially urban-based parties or intellectuals or political organizers or politicians, orient to these large peasant populations, right? That was the original agrarian question.

It was how to orient politically to extant large masses of people who had theretofore not been effectively organized by the left, right? So in any country where you have very simply a demographically significant portion of the population living in the country, side, the agrarian question asserts itself or should assert itself almost organically, historically has asserted itself more or less organically, simply by virtue of the fact that those are the people whose social demands and political demands and needs and also subjectivities need to be attended to in the process of attempting socialist revolution

and trying to consolidate socialist revolution through either post-colonial or post-revolutionary state formation and economic development, right? So it's very central. Agrarian questions are also actually very central in the north, in ways that are really less apparent, primarily because of the demographic shifts I was just mentioned, primarily because you have had huge shifts of population from the countryside to the cities.

And therefore, many people would assert that the North does, the North Atlantic does, in fact, not have an agrarian question, which blocks from view at least two central aspects of political struggle in the North. One is the question, and people love this word solidarity, right? But the solidarity does not usually get asserted or get raised when it comes to how to orient to a southern agrarian question of, say, national liberation, Right. In fact, that that implies a corollary political task in the north on the one hand. On the other hand, the agrarian question in the north has only been so-called settled or consolidated on the basis of several processes, interlinked processes of primitive accumulation and ongoing processes of neo-colonialism that in fact need to be transcended in order to have. just resolutions of all kinds of social contradictions on a worldwide basis.

Yeah, I noticed that you've done a lot of work on North Africa in particular and in your research and consulting and policy writing and work. And so I thought this might be a good focus for seeing how the differing national liberation experiences, movements, and struggles in North Africa dealt with the question of land and, you know, the agrarian question and peasant society. And I guess I'm thinking a little bit about Phenon's Wretched of the Earth. And, you know, he talks very obviously when he's, you know, pitching it broader. But, of course, many of his examples are drawn from the experience of Algeria because of his participation in that.

that national liberation struggle against French colonialism. But I recall, even in the very first chapter, he says, like, the peasants, you know, people in the countryside, their chief concerned is land and bread. This is what the whole revolution is about. And politics has to address itself to that. And he makes a big point of saying, you know, of distinguishing between these urban, you know, political orientations versus the broader struggle. in the countryside, which we know, you know, the FLN was best organized, actually, for most of the struggle in the countryside and successful there. So I'm wondering if maybe you could talk about the Algerian case and how the agrarian question functioned in there. And perhaps if we have

an opportunity, we can look at the differences in places like Tunisia and Morocco that had a very different path and different subsequent histories. But let's start with the Algerian case. I mean, so in the Algerian case, you had an incredibly violent process of settler colonial land alienation, which was first required the imposition of settler property relations and settler sovereignty. that is the political capacity to impose the rule of Western capitalist property upon a foreign country, right? So even before, you know, throughout the 19th century, the French had a great deal of trouble imposing property relationships. And this is why they leveled the country to the ground, right? they eradicated half of the population of Algeria during the course of settler capitalist colonization. Of course, settler colonialism is always settler capitalist, but I use this terminology deliberately

because, in fact, conceptually speaking, there's been a successful evacuation of the materialist aspects from settler colonialism to the point that, in fact, contemporary theorists don't consider Algeria's settler colonial case. We can bracket this question, but it's, from the perspective, if we take the theorizations of the national liberation movements as normative, this would be a completely ludicrous position, but nevertheless, one can find it in the literature. Now, thereafter, the French basically treated Algeria in two ways. I mean, one of them, it became an outlet for resolving social tensions in France itself. So France was able to ship off large portions, not super large portions, but portions of its population. So as to provide them with what Fanon said,

the Algerian peasant wanted, which was land, right? Land was in fact provided French lower classes through the process of settler capitalist land alienation and primitive accumulation, and therefore the French were able to actually farm in Algeria, right? And then they produced a lot of things that were then shipped for a great profit to the Frenchman. It was a major producer of wine. It was a smaller producer of olive oil. It was a major, major producer of cereals. And these were shipped using, and they were produced on rather large farms where there was a quite large Algerian rural proletariat, which had been chased from the land. There were other portions of the country where the Algerians had retained their own land, and so they were also a semi-proletariat.

That is, they would be working the land during some portion of the working year, and then other portions of the year receiving their subsistence from basically their food from subsistence plants, right. So this was the kind of the basic settler capitalist property framework, which existed in Algeria, and of course meant that the corollary of the French primitive accumulation of the land towards both the relaxation of social tensions and the accumulation of surplus value within the white settler class was the systematic emisseration, marginalization, and proletarianation or semi-proletarianization, if not outright eradication of the Algerian population. These were interlinked processes that also went alongside value transfer from, at least you can

say the Algerian territory to the territory of France. So these were the basic contours of the Algerian settler, agrarian question as it presented itself when the revolution exploded in 1954. Now, it's worth actually adding something, is that it's commonly thought, right, that Fanon was writing about Algeria in the wretched of the earth. I think this is because people have never heard of a country called Tunisia. And it's understandable. And there are, of course, portions where he's clearly talking about treating Algerian prisoners in the psychiatric hospital. It goes without saying this is a bad Algeria.

But when he's talking about the, you know, the national bourgeoisie and national consciousness and so forth, if one has studied this period of Tunisian history, which I did because I wrote my dissertation on it, so I know a bit about it, including reading probably half of Bargiba, the president of Bargiba speeches from the post-colonial period between from 1955 until 1970, you realize Fanon was understandably, because he was living in Tunisia, he was reacting to Borgiba. So one finds the same phrases. He would say the battle for decolonization, the battle for liberation becomes the battle for underdevelopment. This was a Neo-Distur, the Tunisia governing party. This was a neo-destroar slogan practically.

I mean, Borgiba would repeat this time and time again in his speeches, right? So he was really ripping into Tunisia without mentioning. Tunisia very much. I mean, one, this was the function of the overall abstraction, Fanon was working with. Two, it was probably a function of having to maneuver as a partisan of the Algerian National Liberation Movement while having safe harbor in Tunisia as a basically reluctant rear base for the Algerian National Liberation struggle. So you had, you had these mixed aspects. And so, sorry, this is a bit disjointed.

But now to go back to Algeria, I mean, this is why the kind of systematic semi-proletarization and emissoration of the Algerian people was exactly why Farnon put the issue very bluntly. And he was saying the people want bread of land, actually the people want land as a means of getting access to bread, right? And, you know, this is why Fano is such a central figure. in thinking about the agrarian question. And it also presents itself with something very odd

in contemporary Fanon chatter that Fanon's focus on land has actually basically been extirpated from the great majority of the theoretical corpus that works on Fanon. I think people appreciate his barakness and his deployment of Galilean terminology and so forth because theorists like someone who's hard to interpret, because then you can make them say what you want. But in fact, people didn't, there's been comparatively little focus on something.

Fanon was really telling us very simply. He said, yeah, we want, the people over there want land. And so it's understandable that this has been really suppressed in Fanon shatter because, of course, the actual central basis, the central material basis of white supremacy on a world scale is settler land relationships. and their subsequent transmutation into neo-colonial land relationships. I mean, we know this from the Patnex, and we also know it, frankly, from Walter Rodney, and we also know it from Eric Williams, that actually wealth from the land, if not direct ownership of the land, has been the central basis for accumulation on a world scale

and retains an absolute centrality. So if you don't address or lift up this fundamental process of dispossession, and theft and this fundamental and ongoing contradiction, you don't have to address it and you won't address it and you can't address it. And it's understandable that a kind of compatible left doesn't want to address those things, right, or finds it natural to not lift up those things in the first place, even though they present themselves, the absolute central social contradiction on a world scale and also present themselves as absolutely central to every, major revolutionary struggle going on in the world today.

Just to follow up a little bit more on the history of the Tunisian peasant revolts, because as you said, it seems like many people have not heard of Tunisia, and I know that you are more aware of it than just about anybody else that I can think of. Can you talk a little bit about the history of those peasant revolts within Tunisia? Because to my understanding, there was essentially two waves of peasant revolt in Tunisia, one of which was very heavily influenced by the agreeing question just explicitly, and one was a bit more Nassarist in origin. Am I understanding this correctly? I mean, let us say you're understanding it better than 99.9% of the planet.

But I may make a few corrections just because it's the other part. No, no. Go ahead. I want you to correct me, Max. This is exactly what I want. Yeah, yeah. It's the topic of my dissertation. and my manuscript that I'm slowly inching away on. So, you know, this is one way of phrasing it.

But actually, first of all, I like to think of the Tunisian agrarian question as a part of organic and contiguous Arab agrarian question, right? I mean, and an agrarian, a pan-Arab agrarian question that emerged against the threat of imperialism, settler capitalism, and monopoly capital, right? Intertwined, interlocking social, economic, and political forces that were carrying out processes of dispossession and exploitation on a world scale, right? So, you know, the initial burst of Tunisian armed activity, especially, especially the armed activity, which came from the Tunisian peasantry.

It was first it was in actually eastern Tunisia in the mid to late 1940s. Zerramdin Felegg. And this, in fact, was explosive, and they were hated by the French colonizers. And they were carrying out this. They were kind of, you can call them bandits of sorts. But they were rebelling in the eastern countryside. And it's to the point that we don't actually have proper histories, first of all, right? So this is, again, a case where the political economy of knowledge construction actually

overdetermines the epistemology. So we don't even know it hasn't been written about properly also because these were a peasant revolt, right? Not so popular to write about, especially including in the Tunisian Academy under Neil Colonias. Now, what's interesting is that some of the, I think the Zeramdin Filaga, where I believe captured and killed, when they were trying to go. to Palestine. So Tunisia sent a huge disproportionate. And Tunisia is a small country. It sent a huge, huge portion of the North African fighters who either went to Palestine or were trying to go to Palestine. Now, these fighters, first of all, were also part of an agrarian question. They were

fighting against the political face of monopoly capital, Western trusts, Zionism, which is actually a settler capitalist process of land alienation, right? They were fighting against that process, right? So this was actually, as I see it, this is part of the Arab aggraring question, and you can say the Arab peasant war, which unfolded against the varied forces of Western colonialism or a settler colonialism, which was taxed up by the West in the Arab region. Now, these fighters were the most effective contingent that actually entered the Palestine Front, entered from Syria.

And the fighters who were training in Syria, including some of the officers, were training in the officers. These people then went on to form the nodes, the nucleus of the Tunisian armed national liberation struggle when they went back to Tunisia after demobilizing from the Syria front into Palestine. They went back to Tunisia. And the history of what, of course, it's a bit murky. And it seems that they were starting in 1950, more semi-independently, but although with a kind of a verbal spur coming from the future dictator, Habibu Argiba, they were mobilizing in the countryside, they were making links, they were moving up and down the southeast of the country and the interior, they were, say, kind of preparing probably caches of arms. they were building up logistical networks and so forth to be able to launch a peasant war when the time came. Then the time came in 1952.

And this was the insurgency, which we call the philaga insurgents. It's actually a word that at the time was pejorative, it meant like a cutter of wood, but has been basically very much reclaimed by, especially in the aftermath of the what is called the Tunisian Revolution. And I don't say that and like, I just, I more or less mean that because it's like, the situation is really shitty here.

So, you know, people will also call it, I'll file that when I say, the Tunisian chaos. And so they, from 1952 to 1954, an armed insurgency spread across all of Tunisia, for the most part, going slowly from south to north. And it systematically targeted collaborators who were overwhelmingly people with land because not always, but often, or people with prestige, right?

So the collaboration, the collaborator class was also a social class in that sense. And they systematically targeted French settlers. And I haven't been able to unearth enough of. what they were basically fighting for, but it seems to me that the great majority wanted the French to leave, understandably, right? If you want the French to leave because they're occupying your land, it doesn't matter how exactly you articulate this question. You're fighting an contrary question, a war of national liberation, that it's central contradiction that it's arrayed against is who has sovereignty and therefore property rights over the land, whether or not

framed in such specific technical terms, that's actually what is occurring, right? Now, you know, there's other places where the theory of it was more clear, and the theory does matter, but the lack of such a theory shouldn't necessarily undermine the political process that was unfolding in the Tunisian countries. Now, this, so they were systematically targeting settlers. They were also very wary of the degree of mechanization. They were were linking the degree of mechanization to the degree of land alienation and semi-proletarization and their inability to receive enough, their inability to actually work on the land. There was a clear understanding, which was also linked to some of the discourse of Farhar Hashad,

who was the incredible organic intellectual of the Tunisian trade union, who was assassinated by French Contras in 1952, right? But you had these processes going on. Now, by mid-1954, the French understood fully that the game was up, that they would have to yield or see in some kind of political control, which they hoped to minimize. They were very hopeful and optimistic that they could minimize the amount of political control they handed over, minimize or at least slow down the amount. of economic control they would hand over. And this was an ongoing contestation from 1954, minimally until 1964,

but really it's actually the history of neol colonialism. So it's an ongoing contestation until today, right? I mean, there is Avenue de Paris, Avenue de France. There's a French embassy sitting on the major boulevard with tanks in front of it. There is a French cultural center occupying a huge portion of, downtown Tunis, which is treated more or less as French sovereign territory, and the French ambassador has a house in upscale suburbs that I'm not even quite sure how big it is, but it's quite huge and with a five-meter wall surround. Now, the point is that, okay, so this Bargiba

basically brokered the partial demobilization of this insurgency, starting in November 1954, with the promise of internal autonomy. So he basically used it as, I'm sorry for these dogs. He basically used it as a leverage point in order to pressure the French into yielding internal autonomy to Tunisians. And then these forces partially demobilized. Now, this was November, 1954, December, 1954 that they were. handing over their weapons to these teams of kind of negotiators of sorts who were often linked to the Ujcetet, because the Ujitete, the Egyptian, the Tunisian Nationalist Trade Union,

had nationalist credibility, even more than the party had. So they were able to be credible brokers for asking for the handover of the weapons in a way that the, that the, you know, the party, let alone the French, were not, right? So they demobilized. Now, some of them went to Algeria immediately, right? They fled. They didn't flee. They mobilized over to Algeria to join the struggle there. They didn't see a political distinction in that way between the armed liberation struggle in Tunisia and the armed liberation struggle in Algeria. Other portions, more or less either surrendered old weapons or more or less, and this is still, this is unclear in

the evidence uncovered this far, or they basically said, okay, yeah, sure, we're going to give up these weapons, but we're going to maintain our logistical networks, and we're going to maintain portions of our organizational networks, and we're going to start fighting again in 1955. So by early 1955, they were already preparing for another war of national liberation, right? They didn't, so they effectively accepted to put down their weapons for like six weeks, which basically means it's not really clear to what degree they expected that what they were doing was any form of a farewell to arms at all right now late 19 in around September 1955 Salah bin Yusuf having been in Bandong and being more and more

exposed to Nazarism and also the the cluster of kind of pan-arabist intellectuals and political organizers like Yusuf Ruisi and others, Brehim Dubal, were more or less agitating for Tunisia to press on to full autonomy. And this became known as the Borgiba Ben-Yusuf splits. And at this point, the Yusufite insurgency launched a gap in late 1915. and Ben-Yusuf had to flee to Libya in early 1956, and there were pitched battles primarily between French overseen or actual French troops and French military hardware and the Yusufite rebels who were put down and sometimes their villages placed under

placed under curfews or just destroyed by June 1956 in a great majority. Now, the rebellion actually continued and kept kind of reemerging, like from these kind of embers unrest would flare up into fires, 1956, 1957, maybe 1958. Also, because, again, you had a territorial contiguity between Western Tunisia and Eastern Algeria, right? And these were not, you know, hardened borders. People could just float over them. So it's very easy for people to just keep fighting. Or Algerians would come over and start fighting French troops in Tunisia. It happened all the time. So in a sense, this national liberation struggle was kind of ebbing, flowing, starting, stopping, basically in its way

until the French Algerian accord settled their own, right? So you really had this ongoing. Now, ideologically speaking, we don't know enough. I'm still working on this. But, you know, they were fighting for dignity. They were fighting against the French alienation of their country, the French control of their country. They were fighting for freedom from their homeland. They were fighting against the Christian invader.

Now, Ben-Jusuf was more of a doer than a thinker. But there were definitely people who thought that there was. should be an organic fusion between all of the armed liberation movements in the Mahrabian, the North African countries, so between Morocco, Algeria, and France, that this would be the best way to contest French power in the region. And they thought that this was the best way to reassert sovereign control over the process of development. So Ben-Jusuf had certainly, by late 1995, it started to be, started to ideologically internalize some of the thinking of Bendong around national development efforts and the full nationalization of the land and the

economic control of the countries, for example, through control of tariffs and so this started to be on Ben Yusuf's discourse, within Ben Yusuf's discourse. And there was a very strong feeling that this was the essence of the split between the Eusufites and the Bargiva, the question was, are you going to throw the French out, or are you not going to throw the French out? That is, are you going to remove the French from their nesting on Tunis and land or not, right? Which obviously then is a central question. It's an agrarian question of national liberation. That is, which group of nationals would have the right to dispensation over the central national productive force,

which is the land. They weren't framing it precisely in these terms, but this is exactly what it comes down to, fundamentally speaking. Yeah, well, I'm really happy to be corrected because, you know, just by having that one correction, we got an incredible history lesson in the process, so I do really appreciate that, Max. It was fantastic.

One thing you mentioned, though, you made mention of Palestine, which was actually something else I wanted to ask about. So when people think about power, Palestine, they think about a lot of different components and aspects to, you know, the conflict that has been going on there since 48 and, well, frankly, even before that, but they generally don't frame it in regards to the agrarian question. And this is something that you point out in your excellent essay, which I highly recommend everybody check out, does the Arab region have an agrarian question, which was in the Journal of Peasant Studies, and just to paraphrase you in one sentence on the topic of Palestine. which, you know, gets extensive mention throughout this excellent essay. You say Palestine is the quintessential land struggle, yet it's specifically national dimension

has suffered the inattention of critical agrarian studies. So can you discuss a little bit why the agrarian question is central to the Palestinian struggle and also why you think, which you know, again, you dive into in this paper a bit, but why you think that it hasn't gotten the attention of critical agrarian studies, why people, you know, especially in the West, but even just an academia more generally, haven't discussed the agrarian question with regards to Palestine. I think it's really interesting. Yeah.

You know, Palestine is a agrarian question because the basic demand of the right of return, for example, is the right to return to the lands and territories from which the settlers dispossessed the Palestinian people, right? And the right of return is always maintained as absolutely central to the Palestinian struggle. It's particularly, of course, relevant to the refugees who are living in the surrounding camps who are living in absolute squalor and complete poverty and so forth, right? So this is a question of return to actual property. This is, therefore, you know, this is an agrarian question of land.

This is a question of, again, which national group and also which forces within that national group would have control over the national productive forces. Now, Riyadh-Musa has a fantastic unpublished, which is related that it's unpublished. It was a fantastic dissertation showing that, you know, there was a huge portion of the Palestinian population that on the eve of the Nakhla were still, they were not holding enough land for their survival. But they were holding enough land that it mattered to their survival. And the alienation of that land was, in fact, a process of primitive accumulation. You are shifting the control of property from Palestinian. and especially from the Palestinian lower class, you're depriving them of their property,

and you are transferring it to a social block that is organically linked to European imperialism. I don't quite want to say European social block because people objected it. So there were substantial portions of the population that were not of European origins, sure. But from a political economy from a class perspective, it became organically fused with the European,

the interests of a European monopoly capital, right? Now, in fact, the proximity to the Nakhpah spatially and people living in the settler state during that time, this actually accounts for class formation within the Israeli Jewish population itself, right? The closer people were to living in the territory at the time of the Nakhba, the more wealthy they likely are, right? is why you have, especially the Germans, although the Germans brought their own capital with them, that's one of the wealthier portions of the Israeli-Jewish population. So, you know, it's just like it's absolutely central, this question of land. Now, who has the capacity to determine the disbursement of property rights within this

territory, which became called Israel and is Palestine, who determines the allocation and the political control of property rights. Right now, it is the Israeli regime. And the struggle for liberation and return is a struggle to say Palestinians, and of course from the left, the working class Palestinian should have the right to non-alienation, that it should be de-alienated from the productive forces within historical Palestine, which is, first of all, the land. And I'm framing this in very technical terms, although the discussion is not amongst the Palestinian movements, is not always using these technical terms, just to clarify that these technical terms from a theoretical analytical perspective are applying precisely to what's going on in Palestine, right? I mean,

I don't think there could be any plausible argument against it, even though it doesn't enter the discourse necessarily on those terms. I'm just kind of doing it as a heuristic device to kind of highlight what I'm talking about. That is, it's very clear that. It's very clear. there is a central agrarian question that is Palestinians can have no hope for building up building socialism or building eco-socialism unless they have some kind of control over their national productive forces. Now, what is their national productive forces? Well, there isn't very much, there's some industrialization in Palestine. You know, there'll be, God-willing dispossession of the factories. But nevertheless, the land remains a central source.

for people's well-being. It remains a central source for food. It remains a central source for housing. It remains a central source for industrial inputs. And it remains a central source for exports needed to secure capital. I mean, you just can't do those types of things unless you have land. And if land is being alienated precisely by this social political process that we call settler colonialism, then therefore you have a national liberation question that remains

in front of not only the Palestinian people, but to the extent that it remains. remains a central flashpoint and crystallization of the crash struggle on both a regional and the global scale, you have a national liberation question that presents itself in front of the Arab peoples as well, right? And it's basically understood very much as such. That's why the right of return continues to have enormous resonance amongst not only the Palestinian population, but the Arab population at large. This is also why the Israelis are so eager to liquidate historically, along with America to historically liquidate the right of return and get people to surrender the right of return

because of what it represents, right? Like people will talk about it very technically, well, will enough Palestine needs go back during two-state question or not? This is like, first of all, there's no two-state solution never was going to be on the agenda. It never would be really on the agenda. But nevertheless, the question is, of course, that what was wanting to be muted is the central question of who is the adjudication

of property rights within this geographical manner. territory of Palestine, right? The suppression of it is also, I think, kind of this process of control and this process of accumulation passed through the prism of imperialist ideology as it manifests in the academic and intellectual institutions, right? So on the one hand, I mean, I think, you know, agrarian studies, of course, you know, was probably like most of Western academia until, say, the late 2000, the late, the end of the first decade of the 2000s or the beginning of the 2010s. There were probably a lot of, there were Zionists everywhere, right?

And, you know, I'd be, there's still lots of Zionists everywhere. They just hide it, frankly. I can start listing people I know who are Zionists, probably you guys retweet. Now, I'm not going to do that because we're trying to stay on topic. But the basic point is these Zionists are everywhere. And you can see them if you pay attention. Be that as it may, right? So, of course, it was hard to get Palestine on the intellectual and political agenda of critical agrarian studies.

Normal, right? It's very normal that there was this difficulty because Palestine wasn't on anyone's agenda. I mean, it was on the agenda of the radical left, for example, in the 70s and 80s in the United States and Europe for sure. and Jesse Jackson and so forth. I mean, people forget this, but actually there was a lot of residents for like the first Intifada

in the United States. And like the 90s was really when there became this kind of process of intellectual and political, ideological quarantine again around Palestine. But so this accounts, I think, for a big part of its exclusion. And then the second part of its exclusion,

I think, is linked to the suppression of the question of national liberation, which is still, present in agrarian studies, unfortunately, and it is something we struggle against, which is that we want to assert that national liberation should be on the agenda. Of course, national liberation is not just relating, and we can get into this maybe later, national liberation, but briefly, national liberation is not just about countries that are directly colonized, right? National liberation is against neo-colonialism, which means foreign control over, foreign monopoly

control over the productive forces, including through domestic intermediaries and the companies. So national liberation is, in fact, a central issue in a formerly sovereign southern nation states. Now, unfortunately, a lot of the discussion of the national question has kind of been partially subsumed and partially displaced by an indigenous discourse, which comes with its lights and shadows. I mean, there's a lot more solidarity with domestic indigenous forces, for example, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and also in a worldwide basis where people, the fourth world has really been the underside of not only, Western colonial, Western state formation, but has furthermore been somehow the underside of often processes of national consolidation in the third world. This is a serious contradiction that one should not denigrate in any way, shape, or form. But nevertheless, this is not the same as stating that there is an ongoing national liberation question, which is directly

unfurling against the forces of monopoly capital, right, which means that there's a direct, overt Western culpability. Now, you know, so I think the, of course, I think the indigenous question is tremendously complicated. It's very plastic, right? People are saying, okay, well, if you support the indigenous struggle in the United States, then you should, or in Palestine, then you should support the indigenous struggle in exactly the same way in Western China, right? As an example, rights. The indigenous, and of course people have rights to all kinds of autonomy. This is not the point at all, but the point is that it becomes evacuated. It can become evacuated of a class basis. It can be evacuated of its orientation to monopoly capital. And then it became an agenda, it can become, unfortunately, it can become an agenda for Balkanization. It is actually a huge issue during the Iraq in Algeria, where a few people tried to raise the Amazir question. as a question, as a kind of question that detracted or should be attended to in a balkanization way within Algeria, and this, the Algerian people's completely rejected it,

outright rejected it. And this is aggressively pushed by forms of Western, in Western academia and so forth. And of course, the Zionists are interested in as well. Be that as it may, right? So this is why it's really been marginalized, I think, in agrarian studies. It's been very hard to get it back on the agenda. On the other hand, there's a criticism of Palestine studies as well, which is that it is overwhelming large portions of it for a variety of reasons have a Bushman nationalist agenda. Now, this is because in part, if you have a week left in Palestine,

which you do, it's going to be less able to assert itself to set the intellectual agenda. if you also have left in Palestine that is on the terror lists and that even mentioning if you are in Arab or let alone affiliating with the Palestinian historical left, namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, right, can get you visited by the Makhabra, by the state police, political police in the United States or could get you banned from Europe

then or expelled from Europe, then you could, there's understandable reasons why you're unable to mount the type of political pressure that would then be reflected in the process of intellectual production. And this is also why people do not want

to mention so much class, except for maybe they'll mention the PA now and then again, but there's not this mention of, you know, you have an overwhelmingly bourgeois nationalist historiography. I mean, Rashi Khalidi, who has done certain good work on political history of Palestine is a member of the Palestinian ruling class, right? And for example, his work does not mention the employment of Palestinian men as almost slave labors during the construction of British infrastructure from the 1920s to the 30s to the early 1940s.

I have a colleague Samar Salah who wrote a beautiful master's dissertation about this, right? It was actually very central to the process of imperial British control over Palestine. Now, there are people pushing back on this agenda, of course, but again, the dominant trend is one of bourgeois nationalist's historiography, and, you know, it comes in various shapes and colors. And so there, you know, there's a reluctance to discuss the control over the productive forces, namely the land, not least because it raises serious questions about. Not about, first of all, the bourgeois complicity with the destruction of Palestine, right? Or the bourgeois complicity with the destruction of the Palestinian 1936, 1939 peasant revolt, which was one of the major peasant revolts on a world scale in that period. An incredibly important revolt that activated the entire Arab region.

produced solidarity demonstrations where they were, I believe, holding, I believe they were Palestinians were holding down a fifth of the British army during that period, right? This is a huge, huge, not only a peasant revolt, but a peasant revolt that was, had a very clear class basis, right, and actually had clear class demands against the landowners. So, of course, there, this stuff, you know, has, you, you did not enter the historiography. And, I mean, there, there are now some people. a fellow named Charles Anderson has done very good work on the 36-39 revolt that is not yet published.

But this is one of the major peasant revolutions of the 20th century. I think one of the most important wars of national liberation, after the Algeria one, maybe in the Arab region during the 20th century. And I don't know if we've had a serious study on it since Hassan Kanafani wrote his account of it. And then predictably, because he was too dangerous, was assassinated by the Mossat because a man like that is a weapon. So it had to be disarmed, right? So we have all these processes that people, I think, aren't talked about enough. I know Comrade Henry has had some encounters, we can say, with processes of intellectual counterinsurgency on the Western left.

But it's not talked enough about that the ideas that are placed in front of us under this kind of amorphous formation called the left, term I'm disposed. buys, right? The ideas that we have in front of us are a reflection, have a, have a materialist basis. They are not coming from nowhere. And there are various, you know, this is not our fault always necessarily, but there's also class projects within the left about what does and doesn't get put on the agenda. And if that's not understood accurately, then you cannot contest it. And if you can't contest it, then you can't win. just to make a quick note before I let Brett hop in with the next question, since you mentioned some resistance that I faced. This is in no way related to the fact that the translation of

Losorto Stalin book that I and Salvatore Engel de Morrow will be coming out around the time that this episode drops. People can find that at Peace Land and Bread in their imprint Iskra books. So that book will be coming out around the same time as this episode. And there is no relation between that mention of the book and any pushback that I may have received in the past by, you know, Western academic left press. Anyway, Brett, go ahead. Yeah, well, brilliant and in-depth analysis, as always, Max, on that last question. You just dig so deep with that stuff. It's just like a learning experience to listen to you talk. But I want to kind of shift over to the east, if you will, and talk about the central question, the centrality of the agrarian question.

in both the Russian Bolshevik and Chinese world historical revolutions. Can you kind of talk about the role that the agrarian question played in those two revolutions and the differing approaches taken to the question? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular had, I think, a very different orientation to the peasant class than now. I mean, Lenin was definitely willing to, was able to be flexible enough to understand that the peasants would have to play a role, an important role in a revolution in a country with a majority, it was a peasant country, right? Namely, the Soviet Union, right? And he was, I think, faced great difficulty in the aftermath of the revolution in terms of the role of the peasantry in the economic development of the,

Soviet Union. This is also why you saw all kinds of wavering back and forth, the NEP in the 1920s, which actually worked pretty well in terms of peasant production, maybe didn't work well enough in terms of industrialization. But nevertheless, throughout this period, it was kind of, although they had a space where they did not want to put peasants center stage in the process of socialist construction. And they basically submitted the task of, therefore, of socialist construction to the task of sovereign industrialization. And one, and here I'm borrowing so the framing of Parisero Semuelan Pravinja, who again, I really hope you guys will have on in the future. You know, on the one hand, this was the, this was the legacy of the European

Convention. So the Western, the European Marxist Convention, which was basically anti-peasant, right, including the bulk of the writing of Marx himself, until the end of his life. And then you have the letters to Vera Zalasudic and his thinking that perhaps the peasants could play a role in, through the Russian Mir, in a process of kind of immediate transition to a a post-capitalist form of social organization. But the bulk of the work, for obvious reasons, because people are limited by their times, was anti-passing, right?

So, of course, the Bolsheviks inherited this legacy. It's very normal that this would happen. And on the other hand, you know, I always have to insist on this. They were faced with capitalist encirclemen. They were worried about the threat of attack along the West, which is exactly what happened by the fascist capitalist Nazi state. And, you know, there is somehow it is lost that the, you know, the Soviet industrialization

debate was largely informed by the need for breakneck industrialization in order to armor the Soviet Union against the attack, right? And why is this, this is omitted why? Because people in the West, in my opinion, actually cannot really imagine that countries have legitimate security concerns. They're like, oh, are you aligning with the bourgeois? I'm like, bro, you can't have hospitals and social security systems and shit if your country is being invaded. Sorry. Like, I want social security and hospitals, whether I live in a capitalist regime or a socialist regime. Like, I want to be able to cross the street and not worry about getting bombed, right? I want some basic things like that. I also definitely want to build communism. But the fact that

you have never confronted a concern for the integrity of your national state doesn't mean other people on it. They're like, it's not very a big deal. It's not like the U.S. has ever violated the sovereignty of a national state before. And I'm like, oh, wait, no, it did that 40 times in the last year, right? It actually, arms contra army. and sends in agent provocateurs and sends in shock troops and rolls people up to the border, regularly bombs people, it has Israel does it for it and so forth, right? I mean, Israel has been regularly bombing Damascus for the past decade with absolutely no response from the bulk of the Western left, which calls it Assadists.

And you're like, no, like Israel shouldn't be able to bomb another country's airport just because you don't like it. Because CNN told you that there's atrocities going. You know, be that as it may, I think this. This is actually something that people fundamentally don't understand. There's very good work on it now, just empirically going through the statements of the time where people are like, Stalin wanted this, Stalin wanted that. No, Stalin decided to industrialize the country primarily, not solely, for defensive reasons, right? They were worried about an armed defense against an incursion, a defense that in fact proved necessary. Now, the Chinese model was very different, right?

I mean, first of all, the Chinese model was based on mass organization of the peasantry and a war of national liberation that was fought by an armed peasantry. This is very different, right? I mean, Mao himself had a much more organic relationship with the peasant question than anyone in the Soviet Union, with the exception of China was able to have with the Soviet peasant class, right? And this is in part because the Soviet intellectuals were kind of boxing with the populists, right? And so they, of course, took things too far in the other direction. In China, you know, Mao, if you can go through the whole corpus of Mao's collected writings in the peasant class and its fate and its well-being and how to politically organize them in their forms of social organization and class differentiation and the process of surplus extraction and so forth within the peasant class and the relationship of that class to situations of semi-colonialism, so forth. These were absolutely central themes in Mao's writing, right? So although Mao did not necessarily actually fully crystallized the position of theorizing the peasant as the central political subject of

national liberation war and socialist revolution, in practice he elevated in his practical organizing work and also from a kind of, in terms of the overall thrust of his historical corpus of analysis, he really put the peasant question front and center for a variety of reasons. And therefore, the peasant question assumed a very different role in the process of Chinese development that they were focused, the process of cooperativization, although it went too far at certain points, was really much more organic and voluntary in the Chinese sector, in the Chinese agrarian sector. There was a lot more interest in actual peasant technologies than you had in the Soviet Union. It was, of course, not encompassing. It was not uniform. There were a lot

of things that were top down, but there were also a lot of things that were either bottom up or that were effectively decentralized emphasis on peasant techniques of land management, of terracing, of application of night soil, of night soil collection, green fertilizers, processes of village level scientific experimentation for pest management and so forth, right? And there was also this idea that industry should serve the technical upgrading of agriculture. So and in this way there were rural, the whole process of industrialization was woven into the rural development fabric in a very different way in China than it was in the Soviet Union. So you actually had, you know, people like to talk about like the backyard furnaces and pig irons, right, and so forth is the caricature of

Chinese economic development. But also there was an extremely decentralized process of a tractor construction, modification, and repair that was actually part of the kind of first, the process of a kind of scientization of the Chinese rural people. But second of all was fundamentally a way of actually having a kind of supple industrial fabric within the countryside itself that would actually respond to the developmental needs of the Chinese rural people and therefore lay the basis for a relatively more decentralized development process than you had in the Soviet Union with, of course, sure, many, many problems. So this was actually, you know, by the late 1970s, at least in some provinces,

some portions of China, right? You had by well-being measures, you had incredible developmental successes. And this was because of the actual emphasis on, of course, you certainly had an urban bias. Again, I put a lot of the blame on the offensive industrialization. I mean, now was understandably terrified of what was happening in Korea. I mean, he had just seen North Korea leveled to the ground, right? Fifth of the population murdered by the United States. So, of course, there were incredible pressures coming on him for this process,

in terms of shaping the industry. distorting, frankly, the process of socialist construction. Nevertheless, he never submitted to industrialization as an end in itself or as an end that overdetermined other developmental needs in the same way that occurred in the Soviet Union. And so for this reason, I mean, there's a lot to take from the Maoist developmental experience, as I always insist on. I mean, there are a lot of lessons there that are still central for a lot of countries in the third world in terms of the overall creation and mobilization of surplus for a process of national, self-reliant, inward-oriented development that is premised on breaking from the monopoly control capture of the national

productive forces and the monopoly capitalist molding and distortion of national development planning and imperatives, basically to keep wages low and secure surpluses for the North. A couple of things that you've mentioned have stimulated me to ask you about some interconnections that perhaps you could analyze and, you know, draw these strands together. But it seems in several of these different contexts, the question of imperial war and pressure and encirclement has sort of affected land policy, industrial policy, development. And by thinking a little bit about the whole question of, you know, agriculture and development in these contexts, that article also that Henry mentioned and that you were talking about in terms of, you know, the politics around Palestine as a, you know, through this prism of the material question of land and agriculture, is a whole question about war that you mentioned as a mechanism of de-development. And the response is obviously devastating for the Middle East region. But even in the case that you were talking there about, you know, the Soviet Union and the agriculture question, the whole question of land policy, collectivization, and then the way in which that is discursively in historiography talked about as explaining, you know, these supposed famines as a targeted and political question. that I think, you know, is quite relevant today when we think about the Ukraine war and also, again, the whole question about grain and how important for world grain supply, particularly in the global south, that has been disrupted by this war.

So I don't know if there's quite a precise question, but it seems like several of the points you've been raising connect this question of imperial war and land question and food supply and agriculture. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how you see this and the questions of really of why it's so important for national sovereignty, why this sort of whole question about famines and their politicization, either in the colonial period where, you know, we've been informed that the British are responsible for 150, 160 million deaths because of famine that was engineered or, you know, wasn't just a natural occurrence. So it seemed like there's a number of kind of issues that somebody like you would have a great perspective on and trying to think through. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this, on these interlinkages. Yeah, I mean, you know, war is very sensual, right? And this has not been organically theorized that much in the north. I mean, of course, Rosa Luxembourg did a lot of thinking about the role of war in imperialism. But imperialism is, you know, in Western theorizing, I mean, there's a huge emphasis on economics, right?

I mean, or we can say an emphasis on economists, right? And so, again, we see a resurgence of this interest in, for example, unequal exchange. It's actually, unequal exchange is absolutely critical to understand the process of value transfer on a world scale. But unequal exchange does not just happen. Unequal exchange is politically engineered. And how are you politically, you're politically engineering the world system in multiple ways? I mean, first of all, the U.S., you know, the U.S. itself, basically, when it expends the productive forces on a global scale on its warmaking, it actually profits from it, right, because of its political power. And these two cannot really be separately linked, I mean, separated from one another.

I mean, the, you know, the U.S. proxy war on Russia persecuted through the Ukraine and at the expense of the Ukrainian people is, first of all, hammering the Ukrainian people developmentally is also hammering the European working classes and even the middle classes, a lot of whom, especially the left, basically support the war, right? And it is seemingly threatening to lead to European deindustrialization, right? And has led to a hyperinflation. And it's shifting the, you know, the dollar becomes like, this is what, you know, the economist, Mona Ali, you should have her on, you know, talks about using the dollar as like a global wrecking ball, right? And so this has always been the case, but it's particularly acute during periods of war, right? So it's not like the war, the war is part and parcel of a global class struggle. And that's what the history of rule during a period of monopoly capital is.

It's a history of class struggle and war is part and parcel of that class struggle. It's a policy, but it also has a class aspect, right? Now, you know, so and it's central, in fact, to all kinds of developmental processes. And we can't pull it out. And, in fact, the burden of Western Marxist mythology and myth-making and hallucinations that emanate from soas and so forth, right, are basically about removing war from class analysis. Now, it's very interesting. I mean, war, and if you look, for example, you know, at, you know, at. the Arab nationalist, the Marxist, the current of Arab nationalism.

They were, first of all, central that war was also about ideological victory and defeats and the strength of national movements themselves, right? So the Vietnamese victory, for example, and the war of national liberation was understood as a victory for the working class on a world scale. And also was in fact why they came to think that this ideology, the ability to think that you could win was absolutely central to the Marxist end of Arab nationalist theology. Whereas on the other hand, and this is one point that Alicadri always makes,

is that the Israeli victories against the Arab states, in fact, he says, are persecuted and successfully instill a sense of ideological defeat. And so, you know, these wars are operating at the ideological level. They're also operating in terms of who has control over productive forces. I mean, if you break apart these nation states, then they are not able to administer their productive forces. I mean, so you're also disempowering labor on a world's gap because the ideology is not just

about national. It's not nationalism. It's also a labor ideology. Are you, is labor feeling empowered to resist or is labor in a state of profound defeat, right? So to the extent you ideologically defeat labor, which you do through war, if you're the imperialist ruling class, then you contribute to the ideology that makes it not able to struggle for increasing its share of global value on a world scale. So the wars themselves are part and parcel of a class war that is persecuted at the

ideological and material levels simultaneously, right? The war also becomes a way to shatter social wealth. So what happens in wars in the Arab region is that what's lost is value that has become crystallized in state infrastructure. So what is lost are electricity lines. what are lost our hospitals, what are lost our government buildings. Because there's so much capacity in the West, right? We're like, well, if some of our infrastructure got bombed or broke, we would just rebuild it or whatever.

Not that this happens in America, right? It just is allowed to slowly deteriorate. But at least in principle, right, the idea doesn't enter that actually you face a material constraint on the ability to rebuild infrastructure. And so this war is kind of pursued for the, is, you know, destroys these kind of, this socialized and crystallized outputs of the collective labor process and the periphery of the world system. And then the other side of the coin is, you know, so when a, you know, when a bomb from Lockheed Martin drops, this actually increases surplus value in the north. and it destroys a crystallized output of social labor in the South, right? I mean, again, it's happening. I'm explaining it in abstract terms, but concretely, that's what's happening.

Like, the people over there working class is losing access to the good things they need, and there becomes an accumulation process that is bolstered in the North, right? That's exactly what's happening. That's why it continues. right that's why it continues that is uh this is why war is so central to the uh the history of contemporary monopoly capital and that is why it's removed right on the other hand um you force the diversion of social spending in the periphery from social investments to uh war making right becomes a mechanism of the consolidation of either neo-colonial control or urban biases,

precisely because you have to shift value away from working people, particularly in the countryside, and it shifts to cities, it shifts to sectors that are more easily managed by a neo-colonial monopoly capital. And it shifts social, it shifts social investments in state spending away from hospitals and schools and towards militarized infrastructure, right? And, you know, it's not fashionable, but if you use a functionalist logic, then why is it happening? Because it serves the system, right? And it is happening and it keeps happening. And yet so many people, you know, you have a dominant discourse, I think, very often that is like, why are there so many wars going? Right? People literally cannot explain. I'm like, well, just use some functionalist logic. And they'll be like, well, you know, you can't find that in the documentary evidence. I'm like, who wrote the papers, you know? Who writes the documents? Of course, you can't find ideology telling on itself in the state papers, right? But you have the ongoing wars. So as far as I'm concerned, this is sufficient. And you have the ongoing process of polarized accumulation, which requires constant warmaking in order.

to keep it polarized, right? The wars are serving accumulation, and so they keep happening. I mean, this is, you know, it's important to say that wars, I've been using wars a bit, in a bit of an essentialized manner and dehistoricized manner because I've been talking about the wars of northern monopoly capital, right? But actually, then you have the wars of national liberation, right, which are necessary, which are imposed on the South, right? but nevertheless are historically necessary in order to liberate, to break the northern

monopoly grasp over the southern productive forces, right? And so this is generally required, generally this is required war in order to achieve the sovereignty regime, to actually implement the Westphalian sovereignty regime on non-racist, non-right supremacist basis within the world system. It's required war. And, you know, in the case of Palestine, you know, I've always said, personally, in my heart, I've always had the opinion that, like, it's been, it's, one is not thrilled to see people, I mean, particularly Palestinians having to, these young men primarily having to die in these wars.

But there, the peaceful mobilizations have not been effective. And no one wants to talk about it in the West. But the Israelis have been unable to militarily invade the Gaza Strip in eight years, right? An Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip is no longer possible. This is actually remarkable. This is an achievement of a process of my listeners, international law sanctified, armed, armed resistance against colonial processes, right? This is actually a major achievement, and therefore, war is actually allowing for some

form, allows for a protective shield around the living infrastructure, which is actually the result of a labor process within Gaza, right? So what other option is it, right? So actually war can actually produce a bulwark equally for the crystallization of social labor and infrastructure. I'm putting this in kind of like Marxist terms because I feel like people, I don't know actually who's going to listen to this, but like I think it's important to understand that we can use a Marxist terminology.

Like these are class processes. We can use a Marxist terminology to understand war, right? I think actually our listeners will very much appreciate framing your analysis of war in Marxist terms. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we don't always need, like, we don't always need comrade Lenin. I mean, a lot of what I'm saying is Kamradi, who is tough read, but I highly recommend him to understand these processes because he's thinking about it. I mean, he's Lebanese. You know, Lebanon has been living under a war regime for like, you know, 40 years.

I mean, they aren't war imposes upon life and livelihood. And it's natural that the organic intellectual response coming to it. comes from Lebanese development economist, right? That's, it's natural that thinking would follow experience, it would follow and crystallize a historical experience in that way, right? And so I think it's essential to understand also that, you know, and I think this very much relates to what is, you know, it's called the national question.

I mean, if you bring up these questions of war, national liberation, sovereignty, people would always be like, oh, you're just supporting the state bourgeois or you're supporting the national bourgeois or you're just being you're being a non-supporter of the working class in that country I might know like the the the political the carapace of sovereignty when it's hardened enough to actually offer protection for the actual social infrastructure required for a decent life in a given country this is class as a lived experience of how people live their lives right mean class is not they assume that there's an assumption that you're defending the process of capitalist exploitation and extended reproduction when you defend political sovereignty, right?

And you're like, no, first of all, capitalism doesn't want extended reproduction. Like, have you looked, have you turned on CNN? CNN will tell you that capitalism is not looking for extended reproduction in Syria and Yemen, right? capitalism is not looking for expanded reproducing in Ukraine, right? I mean, of course it's not, right? Are these processes of expanded reproduction using a circuit, a systematic exploitation of laborers in order to maximize the maximize profit and using absolute and relative surplus value extraction over the length of the working day and so forth? Is that what's going on in Yemen and Syria and Libya?

No, this is actually part of the leveling of the productive forces, which is actually not a process that's unfamiliar from the history of colonialism. I mean, the process is different now. But there's a productivist, which is, I think, ultimately a Western distortion of history through the lens of Western Marxism, which has actually warped the field of vision to think that actually capitalism concerns a sort of development of the productive forces in quantitative and qualitative ways, whereas like, huh, that's not what I mean, workers couldn't even have decent living standards in the West until the Bolshevik revolution. And finally, we have like mainstream

political scientists who put out studies stating exactly that. When if you said it 15 years ago, someone will call you a Stalin's, right? Now it can be asserted 1005 years after the fact is actually just a social reality confirmed by bourgeois social science. Right. So again, you know, I think, what I'm saying is a bit messy and opaque because honestly, we don't have enough work on this for me to be able to offer a clear enough explication of a lot of these processes that I think we need to collectively understand together. But nevertheless, we need to not accept these framings of war and the political sovereignty regime as something that are separate from working class interests. It's quite the contrary. Well, just briefly then, because this is something that

you've been touching on periodically, but I want to just ask the question so that we can get right to it. There's very few critics that are more sharp, sharply critical of the Western left and Western academia than you, Max. It's one of the reasons why I appreciate and love you as much as I do. But within the Western left and within Western academia, as we've been touching on throughout the conversation, there is a dearth of coverage and discussion of the agrarian question. And this even is in the case of speaking of these national liberation struggles, these national liberation revolutions where they are explicitly agrarian in nature, where the role of the agrarian classes was central to the struggle for democracy,

socialism, whatever that national liberation struggle was oriented towards. And yet the Western left and Western academia still manages to like willfully miss this point and obfuscate the centrality of the agrarian question within these points. So what I want to do is just allow you to, you know, have your say in a very directed way. Like, why, why is it that the Western left and Western academia completely ignores the agrarian question, both in the case of national liberation struggles as well as more generally? Right.

Well, although like I'm super critical of a lot of central nodes of Western left and intellectual production and the tendencies, right? There's, you know, it's gotten much better on the agrarian question in the last 20 years. You know, knowledge production is a reflection of political struggle. Political struggle is what puts, what creates shifts in knowledge production. So it was the, you know, the journal peasant studies, for example, was launched in 1970. And this was a time of widespread peasant wars of national liberation. And that opened a space and put it on, fundamentally, put it on the agenda, right?

And with their, then more recently, you know, you had a lot of important organic peasant movements or processes of agrarian struggle in the South, particularly in Latin America, like the Tehra, huge movement. You had the agrarian reform, the AMAP, in Cuba in the process of agrarian change in Cuba, right? You have a massification of agroecology all over Latin America. And these have helped to put agrarian issues on the intellectual agenda in, let us say, a more acumenical. framework, although, again, without an emphasis on the national question. In fact, sometimes the opposite.

I mean, you have some people in these journals referring to like Evo Morales carrying out authoritarian populism. This is just the travesty of, this is just the racist travesty of thought. Nevertheless, I mean, you have a profession, this is, again, the diagnosis of, I think, Yeros and John Moyo, that you've had a certain separate, you've had a sharp separation of theory and practice. I mean, you know, people sometimes fondly, sometimes nostalgically and sometimes really evasively would be like, oh, look at Arrigi, he was like gun running to rebels in the 1970s and so forth. And, like, you know, Wallerstein has his relation to the national liberation movement.

And, like, if they even mention Amin and so forth, they'll be like Mike Davis, he was so connected to these revolutionaries. And it's like, well, no one stops you from being connected, actually, to contemporary revolutionaries. If you want to talk like that, like, they exist. There are these parties, but you probably think they're all Stalinists. So people have this nostalgia about the past. And then, you know, there's also, you know, I'm being a bit of a dickhead. Like, there's also imperial obstructions to this process, right? You can, you cannot have a relationship to the national liberation movements in the Philippines or in eastern Turkey or in Palestine.

Yeah, you have to, you'll be in prison for the rest of your life, right? So it's hard, right? But it doesn't mean people should – there are these terrorists which create those threats were politically decreed as part of the surrender process that Israel and the United States imposed on Palestine and through the Oslo process. These terrorists were politically created. They can be politically removed and it is not illegal to talk about the terrorists. We can talk about them. And these are part of, these terrorists are part of creating the intellectual and therefore political, ideological quarantine around armed primarily Marxist, but also non-Marxist national liberation movements and also, let's be honest, US proxies, which you put up there for declaration in across the world, right?

That's why it's interesting. You can look at, you can Google the terrorists. It's interesting to look at the groups on them. But the point is, of course, so there's reasons for a separation. between theory and practice within the Western left, which is on the ideological level in terms of institutional relationship, is primarily academic. I mean, I'm also an academic. It's not like, it's fine to be academic. I'm never anti-academic. I'm kind of like, yeah, let's like take over the production of knowledge and like orient it towards liberatory purposes. I'm always on board

for this. But like we've got to take over the institutions. We, like, don't avoid them. But be that as it may, right, this lack of organic relationship comes with not only immense costs, but also, you know, we have a process where, you know, people are, can kind of see the horizon of struggle as, one, spontaneous or mostly disorganized social movements, right? or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, right? And like,

this actually isn't to like spit on, you know, Ocasio-Cortez, I mean, come on, this was like fraud from day one. But, you know,

Sanders, I understood the support for him. I didn't support him so much myself. Be that as in May, you know, there is a big, wide world of political struggle in our world today.

And it can be learned about. Right. There are, there's a, you know, there's a young fellow over there and I think Denmark or something who spends all his time learning about the Houthi struggle and is working a lot on Yemen. But why is he like the only dude doing that? Also, I think Jude Kadri is working on it. But like what's happening in Yemen, which I don't know enough about either, is one of the most important struggles in the world today. I mean, I think it's today's Vietnam. You have an armed insurgency of pastoralists and slum dwellers and peasants in one of the horace countries in the entire world who are fighting off the United States and run through its proxy Saudi Arabia and also the Emirates and who are liberating territory and also have a huge actually Marxist, Leninist history in that country, which inflex the thinking of the rebels and also the government on various levels. I mean, and I frankly don't know enough about it. I wish I would love to know much more than I currently know. But, you know, people, even on the intellectual level, people are pushed away from looking into that.

And there's a lot more interest in, say, looking at authoritarian, presumably autokhanis, endogenous, self-activating Arab authoritarianism in Syria. Right. Now, this is a function of the imperial constitution of what is called Middle East Studies. although it's like, it's the Arab region, Middle East studies in the United States, right, where people are encouraged to understand that you should and shouldn't study certain things. And there's a great deal of resistance if you take a certain perspective. I mean, I've had Bob Vittal, who's a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, slander me for just saying we should think about dependency theory, right?

Of course, he doesn't seem to support boycotting Israel. Big shock there, right? But the point is that, you know, you have disciplinary pressures within the universities, and you also have people who, because they aren't thinking about those people over there in a country like Yemen as their comrades, becomes easier to internalize those disciplinary pressures. And they do think of people, you know, fighting for Black Lives Matter as their comrades. So, you know, people need to expand their horizon of empathic solidarity, right? and you know and it's not going to be I don't know how else people plan on changing the world

yeah I could not agree more it's an excellent excellent and important point this is the closing question we have for you and I think I speak for everybody that's a real pleasure to have you on and to learn from you and our audience appreciate you as well but for the final question we've looked in the past we've kind of looked at certain problems in the present and I kind of want to look forward for the final cue so what is the relevance of the agrarian question for the 21st century. It has two faces. One, a question of national socialist development in the periphery of the world system that is in all of Africa, in huge portions, if not all of Latin America, in most of Asia. It is either central to the process of securing

let us say politically and economically sovereign surplus for national development efforts. That is while there's capital in the world system right now, that capital is primarily under the control of the northern monopolies, right? So if you want to be able to use a capital for national infrastructure development that is socialist construction, that's going to come from your countryside. There's not another place it can come from. Then it can be used to build up a national, sovereign industrial plant as well, right? So you need it.

You also need it to assure the social reproduction of the population. You also need it to, that is, to supply people with food and also as inputs into the industrial process that then can come back to the countryside. You also, that's a decentral interface for the stewardship of the ecology is agriculture. I mean, to a greater or lesser degree, agriculture is the meeting through, the, the media, through which people interact with the non-human world, right? Whether it's pastoralism, whether it's forestry, or whether it's agriculture, whether it's fisheries management, agriculture is blanketing, forms of agriculture are blanketing large portions of the earth. If you want a sustainable, permanently durable ecology, you need

a sustainable and permanently durable agriculture, which means that you have an agrarian question of ecology, which needs to be front and center, right? And in the north, it's a lot of the, some of those issues are not at play, right? We have surpluses available, but we do not have a sustainable management of the land in the United States. The agrarian question is also with the center of any struggle for decolonization. And for that matter, the, you know, the indigenous questions in countries that are not under a settler colonial occupation, but where there's an international minorities question, these are often about political rights of self-determination, which includes the self-administration of physical land bases and territories. I mean, I see this

as an agrarian question, right? It's a question of self-managing. although, you know, I don't support the breakup of non-Western nations. So you have these dynamics. The aggrowing question is everywhere we can look, right? So it's not like the aggrarian question. It's not where is it. It's kind of like, where is it? Yeah, that's a great note to end on.

Again, our guest was Max Isle. I can't tell you how many times I've suggested people pick up a people's Green New Deal, which is Max's book. In my opinion, and I'm not just saying this because Max is on, but I have said it other times on the show as well. It's one of the most important books that's come out in the last few years, in my opinion. And I've recommended it to hundreds of people by this point. So I do appreciate you writing that work, Max. And just can you tell the listeners where they can find you, find more of your work,

and perhaps tease what's the next project that you have coming out for us to take a look at? Well, you can find me on research, Kate. You can also find me on my locked Twitter account, frankly. And you can find me on Google. I would like to be able to offer people a publicly accessible place to find my regular chatter, but you won't find it. I'm sorry to say. What I'm working on, I'm working on the history of Arab dependency theory, and I'm working on developing my work on Tunisian Dekonis. into a manuscript on the Tunisian present war.

Well, on both of those projects, as they get towards their completion, let me know and we'll be happy to bring me back on to talk about each of those on the show because they're definitely topics that we should be talking about on this show. So thank you very much for that, Max. Brett, unfortunately, had to leave in the last couple minutes. So I will read him out for his other podcast, Revolutionary Left Radio and The Red Menace. You can find all of the information and the episodes for them on Revolutionary Left Radio. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast?

Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. And if you're interested in some aspects of the Middle East Islamic world, I have a podcast called The M-M-A-J-L-I-S. And I think learning about Tunisia's peasant war would be when it's available. A great topic also for the M-UgL-L-L-S. So that's the kind of thing we're interested in. So listeners, check it out. Absolutely.

I learn a lot from Adnan's show, so I also highly recommend to check that out. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995, and I will just say that we're recording this mid-December, but by the time this episode comes out, because we have a couple other things already recorded, my co-edited book with Salvatore Engel de Mauro, a new translation of Domenico Lesorto's Stalin, history, and critique of a black legend should be coming out right around the time the episode does. So if you're still listening to this and you're interested in that book, it'll be available for a very low cost print copy or as a free PDF. So you can find all of that by either following me on Twitter where you'll certainly see me tweeting about it at Huck 1995 or via Peaceland and Bread, which is the publisher of that book. You can also follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-I-I-I-I-S.

L-L-A underscore pod, and you can help support the show and help us expand. We also will have, and just teasing things, it looks like we will have a spin-off show launching around the time that this episode will be coming out as well. You can help us continue to expand by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of your contributions are greatly appreciated. So until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.

Thank you.