Guerrilla History - World-Ecology and the Capitalocene w/ Jason Moore

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on a good friend and comrade of ours, Professor Jason W. Moore!  In this fabulous conversation, we discuss world-ecology, the capitalocene, and how to view/analyze history through these lenses.  We intend on getting into much further discussion with Jason in a couple of upcoming episodes that we already have planned, so be sure to check this one out to prepare yourself for those! Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, and has authored multiple outstanding books that you should check out. Among these are Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, and (with Raj Patel) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, the last of which we already have an upcoming episode planned for.  You can follow Jason on twitter @oikeios.  Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, a great resource for political education!

You don't remember Den Van 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 Huckimacki, 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? How is your trip to Qatar? Oh, I'm doing well, and it was an amazing trip. I'm glad to be back with you and looking forward to our conversation today. Excellent. I'm hoping to debrief.

you on that sometime. I'm very interested in what your experience was for listeners that are unaware Adnan was in Qatar to visit the World Cup. And if you're interested in the politics and history of the World Cup, we do have a recent episode out with Professor Alexander Avina on that topic. So you can go back and listen to that. Also joined by my other usual co-host Brett O'Shea, who of course is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing great. It's awesome to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, I am too. And we have a great conversation, I'm sure, coming up with a scholar that I've really respected the workup for quite some time. We have

Jason W. Moore, who's an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, author of numerous books, of which I think I have all of them. But today we're not going to be focusing on any book in particular, although we do have plans to talk about a history of the world in Seven Cheap Things. So listeners, if you want to get a head start, on reading that book for that conversation. That will be an episode that we have upcoming with Jason and his co-author, Raj Patel. Jason, it's nice to have you on the show. I know that you've listened to the show before. So it's really nice to meet you. It's a thrill to be here. Henry Adnan, Brett, fantastic podcast, a real political service to the world left, I think, and being willing to talk

about class, class power, proletarianization, proletarian history. This is absolutely fundamental to making sense of the climate crisis and the kinds of climate justice politics that are necessary. Yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do with the show. So I'm glad that you appreciate that and we're definitely going to keep doing that. I'll get this conversation underway by kind of foregrounding what the goal of this conversation is. So, Jason, you are a scholar who is at the forefront of what you call the world ecology conversation. And I really like the usage of the term conversation in this context. And hopefully, you know, we're also taking part within that framework today, as well as the

conversation of the Capitolocene, which may sound somewhat like the Anthropocene to many listeners. I'm sure many more listeners are familiar with the Anthropocene than the Capitolocene. But we're going to be having an introductory conversation on these two topics, the world ecology conversation and the Capitolo scene. So why don't I just let you open up the conversation with, you know, not definition. but like a brief introduction to these two topics and then my co-hosts and I can dig in a little bit deeper onto these after we kind of explain the basics of what this is for the audience. Fantastic. So why don't I start with a question of the Anthropocene, the age of man and the capital of seeing the age of, well, capital. Because that orientes us to a specific contrast between revolutionary traditions of Marxists.

and other forms of historical materialism that understand the question of the web of life is always precisely, as I just said, the web of life, not an external nature. It is a question, ultimately of metabolism, which is a labor process for Marx. And Marx has a famous introduction to this conversation when he says in the first page of his discussion on the labor process, which, as you can imagine for Marx. It's quite important. He begins the question of the discussion of the labor process by insisting it is a metabolism in which human beings act upon what he calls external nature and in so doing are transformed. So what is he saying here? He is saying, if you put it together with the rest of his work, especially in the German ideology, don't worry, I won't go down the exegetical rabbit

hole today. But just to point it out, the class societies emerge in and through the web of life, transforming internal natures and external natures, they are elaborating their relations and regimes of power, surplus accumulation, and the dynamics of production and reproduction, as Marx and Ingalls point out, these are irreducibly socio-ecological, on the one hand social, on the other hand, natural, as they are always, Marx and Ingalls and the German ideology are always trying to make clear. So for us in trying to make sense of the capitalists in the age of capital, we are not merely asserting a theory. It is essentially a way of making sense of the origins of today's planetary crisis, its patterns of development, its turning points between great

phases of capital accumulation most recently between the Fordist Keynesian model and the a liberal model, but there were many, many antecedents going all the way back to the Colombian invasion in 1492, and thereby to make sense of what is actually new and what are the real historical possibilities of the moment.

So for us, in the Capitalist ian conversation, it always comes back to history. And this is what distinguishes the world ecology conversation. And for the nerds like me out there, it's world ecology with a hyphen. I'll try to explain what that means in just a moment.

But basically what we're saying is that capitalism is not just an economic system. It's not just a social system, but that it is a worldwide class struggle in the web of life, which is always shaping and producing, if you will, those webs of life. And it's always simultaneously being produced by those webs of life. So as I like to say, volcanoes will erupt, whether it's socialism, capitalism, feudalism, or any other mode of production, how those modes of production internalize volcanic activity in this example is a matter of fundamental importance. So for world ecology, it is always a matter of history. And in that sense, as you noted, we're a conversation, not a party line. And what we try to do is to take the best of a dialectical holism and ground it in what actually happened historically.

And to close this part of our initial conversation, when I say a dialectical holism, that's very important because we need to remember that holism is a right-wing concept that comes out of J.C. Smuts, the South African so-called statesman in the 1920s. And many of the concepts that are the bread and butter of environmental thought, like population, like ecology, are tinged to say the least with imperialism, with national chauvinism, and were embedded in one or another right-wing or bourgeois nationalist project. So we can't forget that the ideas that we use in the vocabulary that we use is imbued with a deep history. and in the case of environmental thought, often a very dark imperialist and class-driven history. Yeah, a really wonderful opening salvo. And I think, you know, you can define more at length the capital scene if you wish. I think it is somewhat intuitive for our listeners as far as understanding the world historical impact of capitalism. And it's behind, it's driving force behind multiple eco crises, including, of course, climate change.

But I'm wondering because this is often this battle is set up as I think Henry alluded to, earlier between Capitalistine and Anthropocene. So can you talk about some of the advantages, the theoretical and analytic advantages of the Capitalistine concept? And then what are the arguments that people who don't like this term that prefer Anthropocene? What are those arguments say against Capitalistine? What are some of the best ones? And of course, your responses to them. That's a great question, Brett. So there are really two Anthropocene, this weird word that enters into the English language right around the year. 2000, more or less. There are really two major expressions. One is a narrowly defined geological

debate. And this is a debate over whether or not the Anthropocene so-called represents a geological turning point. So the mainstream of that conversation says, well, after 1945, you have nuclear testing, you have chicken bones, and you have plastics. These are the stratigraphic markers. So that's an example of the geological discussion. By the way, I think they're wrong. I think the British geographers, Lewis and Maslin, have it right when they point not to post-World War II developments, but to the consequences to the biosphere that followed on the genocides of the new world. And when we say, well, if we say the geological Anthropocene or the Anthropocene event, which is a much better formulation, begins after the slaving-induced genocene,

genocide's attendant upon the rise of capitalism, we have a radically different understanding of looking at the crisis because it was a cheap nature strategy that essentially killed 50 million plus indigenous Americans after 1492, so much so that there was a carbon drawdown that resulted. This is what Maslin and Lewis called the Orbis Spike, the Orbis for Latin for globe, the Orbis spike, which reinforced other climatological development. to produce the absolute coldest period over the past 8,000 years. Now, that's not incidental, and I want to come back to why that's not incidental by foregrounding this history of the capitalist scene.

So the capital scene is basically a kind of geopolitics. It's a kind of reminder that capitalism isn't all about economics and classes separated from the web of life. So this example I just gave is a really fundamental point in the history of capitalism where because of the genocidal impacts of the Colombian invasion, there was a carbon drawdown that reinforced volcanic activities, shifts in the North Atlantic oscillation to destabilize political and class arrangements from Beijing to Paris. This was the era of the 30 years war, of the English Civil War, of the Fronde in France

after 1648 of peasant revolt, of deeply radical thought, for instance, in the proletarian army of Cromwell's new model army of that era. This was a moment of profound crisis for capitalism, this whole century between 1550, this long century, in fact, I called it the long cold 17th century between 1550 and 1700. It was a moment of climate history. that had been essentially ruinous under similar conditions for feudal ruling classes for Western Rome a thousand years earlier. So climate shifts are often, often very difficult for ruling classes to deal with because they're locked into a given set of agricultural arrangements.

It's the same for the bourgeoisie today, by the way, and we can talk more about this. But anyway, part of what I'm trying to say is that it was this climate crisis of the 17th century partially created by the New World genocides that led to actually a revolution in capitalist production. This was the era of the so-called plantation revolution of large-scale extractivist enterprises like that of Potosi in what is today Bolivia. It was the era of a gendered counter-revolution precisely at the moment of the onset of rapid proletarianization, not coincidental. incidentally. It was the birth of the world color line through the transatlantic slave trade. Racism itself is an ideology. It takes another century or so, 1650 and after to consolidate.

But essentially what I'm saying is that capitalism doesn't just go out and act upon the web of life, that the contradictions it internalizes establish new biospheric and local geographical conditions that force it and forced it to evolve in specific ways. So this era, the birth of the capitalist scene, the origins of capitalism and a planetary crisis, also marked the birth of what I call the capitalogenic. There's a mouthful, a capitalogenic made by capital trinity of the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, and climate apartheid. Those are not the result of an abstract climate change today,

but the drivers of a very concrete climate crisis formation in the 21st century. That's how the capitalist scene is different. And the Anthropocene, I think there's a love of good science with an emphatically uppercase G and S, where Marxists have had a long history of defending bourgeois science that has, frankly, not served them and has whitewashed a very, very dark and repressive and oppressive dynamic of scientization and science's ideology in the history of the modern world

going all the way back to this era that I just shared with you. Yeah, just to hop in here with a couple of quick follow-ups that I just want to make sure that we clarify. So when we're talking about Anthropocene,

capitalocene, one of the fundamental questions that I think that, you know, we would have a tendency to want to push towards the end of the conversation, because it also could be a closing point, but I think that that would obscure the whole reason for this conversation would be why. Why are we having this conversation about these different conceptions of Anthropocene, Capitolocene, why are some people setting it up

as if there's a Cartesian duality between these two, whereas more people like you are actually trying to have a conversation between these two, you know, talking about the the Anthropocene is a geological era versus the capitalocene as a geohistoric era, which I've seen you describe these two conceptions as. But the question is why? Why set up this duality that people are making a Cartesian duality of the Anthropocene and the capitalocene? Why are we talking about temporality?

And I know that for people that have read a lot of history will understand why temporality within history is important because depending on the temporal shift that you're looking at things from, history can look very, very different, you know, if you're looking at a different period of time. So why are we shifting, you know, the temporal plane and periodizing history differently within the conception of the Capitolocene, going all the way back to the Colombian invasion, as you said, in 1492 compared to what many, if not most Anthropocene proponents do. which is setting it up with the Industrial Revolution and the United Kingdom. Why is this? So you just put your finger right on the heart of the matter, that history matters and that when we start the clock on a specific historical process, whether it's capitalism or the origins of crisis, determines pretty much everything about our politics.

Now, we can say a similar thing in terms of how we draw lines geographically around the process as well. So if you take the conventional Anthropocene story, it's terrible history that has long since been discredited, but environmentalists have always loved it, which is it makes the story of the origins of modernity and the origins of planetary crisis into a story of coal and an ingenious machine, the steam engine, and some wonderful or terrible English capitalist. Now, there's a Marxist version of this story as well, which is often called fossil capital. And here's the problem that there are many problems. First, it doesn't begin.

The drive towards planetary crisis does not begin in the early 19th century. The coal mining revolution is a product of the early 16th century. But also, even the key machine and the key technologies of power are not found within Great Britain. They're found in the antebellum south with. technologies of power like modern racism, and a revived or so-called second slavery, and the cotton gin, which was in a Marxist jargon, is the decisive greatly forward in the production of relative surplus value. You had a 50-fold increase in the capacity to extract seeds from the cotton and thereby send virtually limitless amounts of cotton into,

Great Britain into the factories to be manufactured into thread and cloth and textiles. So there's a question of history that's really fundamental. And we need to get clear on what capitalism is. There's always been, and I don't mean like I'm going to give you the correct answer. What I am going to say is that there has been a strong tendency, we can call it formalist, we can call it theoreticist, which is basically to come up with a cookbook definition of capitalism and then say, oh, look, it starts there. But if we understand capitalism as a world ecology in which power, profit, and life are inextricably related to each other as part of a rich totality of many determinations,

as Marx might like to say, then we need to look at the key expressions of a capitalism that is committed to the endless accumulation of capital and does so through combined and uneven expressions. That is, the slave in Barbados in the 1650s on a sugar plantation is dialectically bound to the semi-proletarian cottage household, the rural proletarian cottage household in England at that time is related to the shipyards at Leiden, is related to the cash crop surfing, surf labor in places like Poland. So these are all combined in uneven dynamics of appropriating human and extra human life and work and service to capital. Now, there's a second part of your question, why is it so urgently politically necessary?

And here's the shortest possible version. This popular Anthropocene, so now the geological discussion, although the scientists are always blurring the popular and the geological, and they never apologize for it. They never clarify for it because they're part of an Anthropocene industrial complex. And they don't need to worry about critical voices because their funding won't be threatened, because their careers won't be threatened as long as they continue to behave appropriately. But at the end of the day, it comes down to a flight from history and a Maltusian or Neo-Maltusian man versus nature cosmology. And what the capital scene says is that moments of climate crisis are climate class conjunctures in which the climate is shaping and reshaping the terrain of climate. struggle. And the class struggle is then reshaping the conditions of social possibility. And that

has to be at the heart of a climate justice politics. We have to find a way to confront and reveal the ideology at the heart of this man versus nature framework if we are going to build internationalist working class movements against the climate crisis and the capitalogenic trinity this is so fascinating and such an important discussion and it just i have so many questions so there's two kinds of issues that have popped up into my into my mind here about this one thing that you said earlier in the conversation is about the 16th uh well this cold period of the coldest period in 8 000 years and that as a very important uh long century century century half in the transformation of capitalism. Now, what you implied or suggested there is that a lot of

our orientations around the origins of capitalism and how and when it's identified in these kind of world systems and kind of global analyses of history that you might differ a little bit from some of these conventional narratives, either that located in the Industrial Revolution or that you see maybe a longer history of transformations in world ecology discourse. So that's one thing I wanted to ask about and clarify is how do you see that transition period and the whole transition debate? What do you put down as the key constituents that are necessary to really understand the modern forms of capitalism congealing and out of what? I mean, very often, this is just talked about from a Western perspective of break down a feudalism into something else that we think of as capitalism. But if you're looking at it from a world ecological perspective, how would you characterize that kind of precursor, what's being transformed out of what?

When you talk about this kind of transformation, that was one kind of question that I had. Maybe I'll just, that's a big enough question. That's a huge question. And so the turning point, I think if we are looking at the overall complex of relations of power, profit, and life, the scientific regimes, the imperial structures, et cetera, there's clearly a qualitative transformation of some kind, how we want to describe it. That's something we can debate. But we can't deny that there is a qualitative transformation that begins in the middle

of the 15th century in, I don't. don't think Europe exists. I think you're as except as a descriptor. But in central and western Europe, not because there are a series of really, really rapid, qualitative transformations that essentially allow European capital, European-based capital and empires to go about conquering first the Atlantic and then coordinating vast transatlantic divisions of labor that are very, very different, not more advanced. very, very different. In fact, the economic power very much follows the barrel of a gun. But qualitatively different from what we see was say various incarnations of the Chinese

centered tribute trade systems in East Asia or the extraordinary sophistication of Indian Ocean world trade networks. People like Chaldry and many, many others, of course, have done an outstanding. My colleague, Ravi Palat, and many others have done a great job. articulating. What is the specificity of capitalism that emerges? I think, first of all, we have to understand what happens during the dawn of the Little Ice Age and the kinds of class struggles that ensue. Now, of all people, Wallerstein was the one who took this line of analysis for this. Now, nobody ever reads Wallerstein, and when they do, they don't read him very closely. They think he's a systems theorist. He's not. He was really the only one before

I started writing, who was willing to take the web of life seriously in his account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And in that story that what he called the sociophysical conjuncture of a generalized class war, that's more or less a direct quote, was fundamental. So in this climate class conjuncture of the arrival of the Little Ice Age in the early 14th century, which immediately generates famine after famine had largely been abolished. And, And then through the vast Afro-Eurasian trade networks, creates the conditions for the black death. Out of those changing metabolic conditions, there's a new terrain of class struggle that favors the peasants and urban classes. To make a very, very long story short, essentially the feudalism's ruling classes are defeated in central and western Europe.

And they have to find a different way of creating and expanding an economic model that will make them rich and let them sit on the front porch and drink mint juleps and have a good time. So that took a long time to get going. And we tell a lot of this story in the history of the world and seven cheap things, which we'll get to another conversation on another day. But here's the simplified version of this argument that the defeat and the class struggle under conditions of the little ice age forced Europe's ruling strata and capitalist Strata to finance new expeditions of conquest, commercialization, and then after 1550, especially, 1570 in earnest, you have actual productivist revolutions in the America,

centering on silver mining and then sugar planting and many other activities around those vital hubs. So what is it that's going on that's different? And if we are just focusing on this dynamic of environment making, So remember, capitalism as a system of endless accumulation is premised on the endless conquest and appropriation of the earth and of the work, what I've called the unpaid work of the earth. This is, I've taken to calling this the biotariat after Stephen Collis. So that unpaid work, the appropriation of human and extra human unpaid work is the essential

force, socially necessary unpaid work as the essential realizing condition of global commodification, global proletarianization, global bourgeoisification. And what you see, the proof is in the putting in terms of environment making, the most rapid, largest scale environment-making revolution in human history. And their feudalism, sure, they cleared the continent, but it took them six centuries. Comparable deforestation's occurred and were imposed. And what? region after the other, and basically these 50, 60, 70 years cycles from the Baltic to Brazil. And so once we, as, forget about Marxist, not Marxist, Anthropocene, capitalism, something radical was going on. And this is, none of this is to the credit of Europe, which is an invention of this period.

It's not to the credit of capitalism. In fact, it's to the credit of various Chinese agrarian civilizations. They're going through a major transition at the very same time. they're not dependent on the absolute rapacious rapid fire devastation of environments at the same scale and speed as an early capitalism. So there's something going on about that relation between endless conquest, endless commodification, endless accumulation, and the endless transformation of the earth that is still very much with us. Yeah, I mean, I find that that analysis is like viscerally exciting. It's very interesting. And the analysis of the Little Ice Age in particular is

fascinating. I would say before I ask my question just to make a side point, it's very obvious to you, but just to, you know, concretize it for our listeners, one of the things that the conceptual apparatus of the framing of Anthropocene does among so many other things is, of course, it distributes culpability for these crises across the whole of mankind, something that, you know, bourgeois analysts and thinkers on this topic often do. And in fact, a concept like green capitalism can only arise out of that obscuring of reality in the role that that mode of production itself plays in creating the crisis. So I just think that's something that's worth noting. But I really find your analysis of the Enlightenment period and the sort of ideologies that came

out of it, particularly interesting. You talk about, for example, European universalism and how that leads to this dichotomy between civilization and civilized man and nature. And of course, nature includes things like women, like, you know, native populations that are soon to be genocided and conquered, et cetera. So can you talk about the European Enlightenment, how it generates European universalism, and what the consequences of those ideologies are? So it's a fantastic question. And for me, I used to be quite the vulgar materialist. And so my own journey has very much involved understanding that culture, science, ideology is fundamental. to how capitalism works.

It's also fundamental to the bread and butter of the direct production of surplus value because in this era, something that Henry mentioned, Cartesian dualism emerges during this period in a formal philosophical sense. And basically Descartes, who is a Frenchman,

but, and this is important, was writing most of his works in the Dutch Republic, the model capitalist nation of the 17th century, Marx called it, that Descartes is, formulates this sort of ontological distinction,

like two fundamental bedrock categories of thinking things and extended things. Well, guess what? That was part of a wider managerial philosophy that was about the management of production, but also the management of this capitalist world ecology of power, profit in life, the management of the so-called savages in the new world. indigenous peoples were reclassified as savage. The category, woman, and the way that we understand, it doesn't exist before the 1550s,

as Sylvia Federici has shown. So the transformation of female bodies and male bodies into man and woman is another form of this, into white and not white, is another expression of this. And their tap root is, Brett, precisely as you indicated, the invention of nature. So as soon as you say this, then you have a whole bunch of Marxist, never mind everyone else who are like, no, nature's not invented. You're a social constructivist. Well, look, the web of life is not invented. Yes, you know, the Earth's orbital variations around the sun occur, whether we have full communism or something else. Okay. But what we're looking at,

and the contemporaries of this period, we're quite clear on this, is that there is a zone of savagery and then civilized people who are the thinkers, the managers, the capitalists, the planters, the generals and the officers of the growing armies of the period. So this is a boss's view of the world, right? Like, I have all the ideas, and everyone else is going to just be a sort of passive substance. And in fact, a lot of environmental thought accepts that in its. it's pores. In fact, they still teach the scientific method in universities. So not that the scientific method is always bad, but they treat it as a kind of unadorned and direct access

path to truth. So what we're dealing with in this period is the emergence, the invention of nature before you could get to racism, before you could get to sexism, you had to have this invention, culturally speaking of, here's nature. And then, and I love to. to quote the great German feminist Marxist on this, Claudia von Barrelhot. She says, nature became everything the capitalists didn't want to pay for. So if you were a woman, we don't want to have to pay for the babies we need you to make. If you're an African extracted from Angola and put on a slave ship, we don't want to have to pay for that labor. We don't want to have to pay for most work in capitalism. That's the only way capitalism can

survive. And so we don't often think about this in these terms, but when we think about this taken for granted separation of man versus nature, society versus nature, it is very much a managerial philosophy. And this, so this runs all the way from Renee Descartes to Frederick Winslow Taylor to, I don't know, Peter Drucker later in the 20th century, this organizational managerial revolution. And it connects with Brett's what you said. I'll end there so everybody else can pick up the conversation, but it ends with this sort of green capitalism discourse, but it's not just the world economic forum and that naked version of this. I think it's also what you find overwhelmingly in environmental studies discourse, even and especially

sometimes the critical environmental discourse. It is very much a managerial, a technocratic managerial philosophy. How do we manage environmental problems? And that's what the Anthropocene says above all, that it converts a political question of class violence, exploitation, inequality, the crisis of democracy into a technocratic problem, a technocratic problem to be managed. I think that's the underlying danger and violence of the Anthropocene conversation and the wider environmentalism of the rich in which it's embedded. Yeah, fascinating stuff. And perfectly said, I would also add, and of course you know this, but in addition to the not wanting to pay for the reproductive labor of women and the labor of slaves, of course, they didn't want to pay for the land of the new world that they took over by violent force, of course. But my follow-up here, and you could be as short as this is possible, because I don't want to take up too much time of the other co-host being able to ask questions. But given that Marxism itself does sort of come out of the Enlightenment, and Marxism kind of sees himself as a figure of the Enlightenment, but we also understand this rotten underbelly of the European Enlightenment and the liberal capitalism that it produced.

How should Marxists, or maybe what is an approach that Marxists might take to the Enlightenment itself? Is it simply one of an unfinished project that Marxist can actually take to its full conclusion and liberals can't? Or is it something more complicated? Well, I think Marx, I think you're absolutely right. Mark should be viewed as a man of his times. That's absolutely right. And I'm not one of these people who says, oh, Marx is right. about everything, how dare you change one comma in what Marx said. Of course, it's always in the

opinion of the true Marxist who says these kinds of things. I don't think that was what Marx was doing. But I think in some very, very interesting ways, Marx represents the supersession of this enlightenment tendency, that what we saw in the Enlightenment was with Descartes, the whole of reality was reduced to its parts. So the parts became everything and the whole became nothing. Now, his counterpoint, and people sometimes complain this to me, I don't know why, it was Spinoza. So for Spinoza, he said, Spinoza said, well, the whole is everything and the parts are nothing. But Marx, and actually, John Bellamy Foster has done a great job of this in Marx's ecology. Marks went back to the Greeks and came and then took Hegel and saw the swerve of the

atom, that was a term that Epicurist and Democritus, the Greek philosophers were talking about, and then took Hegel to understand that the parts and whole. are in historically dynamic, dialectical tension, and that they form historical totalities. So going back to this question about universalism, yes, there's a sense in the Enlightenment that changes everything, but there's also a profoundly a historical sense of the Enlightenment that is about, as you just suggested, the perfectability of the Enlightenment Project under an uppercase P progress kind of politics. So we have a lot of tensions going on there. So I think for Marx, first of all, yes, we need to situate him historically. And second

of all, we need to look at how he was very clearly and strongly moving beyond enlightenment models of nature versus society. In fact, one of Marx's greatest contributions is to conceptualize, in my view, capitalism in the web of life. And he has this famous quotation that eco-socialists always cite. And it's at the end of his discussion of large-scale industrialization. So a very, very climactic moment in capital, where he says, capital advances by exhausting the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the worker. But the dialectical implication is that capitalism also emerged out of and developed through the relations, metaphorically speaking, of the soil and the worker, of the proletarian and the biotarian. And I

would add, the femitarian and feminist critics have later bagged on Marx. He was a man of his times, and we can get into that. But I think that those are really crucial insights. I think in that sense, he's a very post-inlightenment thinker. Yeah, just as a follow-up to that, this reminds me of that other question that I was thinking about a little bit, which is that in some of your articles and in your work, you're clearly also arguing against a certain decolonial approach. And I guess what initially had me think about this was, you know, the way that you talk about, you know, 1492 and its consequences for a world ecological approach to understanding, you know, world history, that that might be in sympathy with many of those who argue that it's a destruction

of indigenous communities in, you know, the Western Hemisphere and the continuing, you know, colonial and imperial control of the rest of the world and its devastation, you know, on the world, that this is like the crucial kind of question or problem. And of course, you're incorporating this in your analysis, but I notice that you have some critiques of the misemphasis that a certain decolonial or decolonizing theoretical approach misses when it comes to really engaging world history. And so you have this article where you talk about the flight of history. So I was wondering if you could perhaps specify a little bit further some of these critiques that try to actually marginalize Marxist thought, not that he should be taken,

as you point out, as some profit that can't be questioned. But they don't necessarily engage with his ideas. They dismiss him as a Eurocentric thinker as part of this Enlightenment inheritance that, you know, Brett was talking about with you. So I'm wondering. if you could perhaps specify a little further what your problem with this, you know, this emphasis on settler colonial racism as the, you know, mode that needs to impel a decolonizing perspective as the true liberatory orientation. What do you think it's missing in world historical terms? And how do you specify in your analysis what you have to take into account in terms of materialism.

It was such a great question, and we could spend, I feel, all afternoon talking about this. I wish we could. Once upon a time, and Adnan, I know you know this much better than I do. Once upon a time, there was an anti-imperialist Marxism that understood the entwining of class, race, and nation as a fundamental intellectual problem, but also a political project in the transition from capitalism to socialism. This was associated with thinkers like France Fanon and Emmanuel Wallerstein, who brought the French text to Grove Press in the early 1960s to continue this anti-imperialist critique, of course, many others in Anabal Quijano in the tradition of decolonial thinking, who is, I think, unfairly and shamefully marginalized by figures like Walter Magnolo. I think that that older tradition of class, race, anti-imperialist Marxism has, it's just been dismissed, and it's almost now like we pretend that it doesn't exist or we invoke Phenon, but only at the most superficial level.

In my teaching, I always point out, if you go back and read the wretched of the earth and look at who he criticizes most strongly, it is those interfaith. intellectuals who want to reduce the problem to a surface level of native versus settler. And he's always pointing out that there is a deeper dynamic of class and empire that's unfolding that really have to be. That whole chapter on pitfalls of national consciousness is just all about this. I don't know how anyone can read Fenon and ignore it. Well, we're in very dangerous neoliberal times. So we're at a moment where decolonial has been cleansed of any radical. content. And what's emerged in this kind of anti-settler colonial trope is what I've called a woke

clash of civilizationalism. And indeed, I look at even scholars who seem on the surface to embrace class analysis, when they get to the question of indigenous community, they stop and they define indigenous communities in non-class terms. Now, overwhelmingly, and everybody knows this, If you go to any, I mean, in the U.S., we still, the U.S. still called some reservations, but any indigenous territory, those are class societies. And the erasure of their class character in woke critical discourse does working class indigenous peoples no favors. It does the struggles of a anti-imperialist class coalition no favors.

it politically disarms us in so many ways. And what I've argued is not for a simple return to class, but for a return to history. And so I've criticized both figures like Magnolo and Escobar and other folks in the decolonial camp, but also many Marxists are for engaging in this flight from history. So I will read all of these critiques so-called that are not really critiques at all, because all they want to do is reassert their conceptual and theoretical truths without wrestling with the thorny historical political problems. And honestly, in my view, I think that this tendency to treat indigenous peoples as non-class entities and as somehow specially constituted to defend, and I quote from, I think this is

Magnolo or Escobar, to defend their life territories, that's blood and soil nationalism. Now, it has completely different political sympathies, but that is not a radical position. And in reifying indigenous peoples in this, I guess, supposedly favorable way, it comes perilously close to older tropes of the ecological Indian. And what's really disturbing is that this discussion has been virtually silenced on the left. Well, I'm going to hop in here. And I'm going to actually swing us back around to a few points that we had been talking about before. So, Jason, you had mentioned the zone of savagery before. We had previously talked about this false duality of man and nature, you know, ignoring the fact that humanity is nature, you know, it is inextricably part of nature.

And you also mentioned Thomas Malthus. And so I know that we had briefly talked about Malthus online before. So I would be remiss to not have this, take this opportunity to bring up Malthusianism. at least neo-Malthusianism. So when we're talking about Anthropocene and Capitolocene, one thing that really strikes me is one of the key reasons that many people that are proponents of the Anthropocene are missing the point is that they boil it down to, again, this duality, man nature. And in doing so, they completely erase the role of capital and of capitalism.

man in itself is the enemy of nature to many of these people. I know that there's, of course, many people that are proponents of the Anthropocene that, you know, do focus on class and capital, but there are many thinkers that do not. And in such a way, you have the possibility, one, it whitewashes capitalism. You know, it completely gives a past the capitalism in terms of degradation of the environment, in terms of the gross destruction of, you know, the natural world. And instead boils it down to, well, there are people. There is going to be destruction because there are people.

This then can lead to Malthusianism. And just as a brief aside, this is something that you might find funny, Jason. I know I've brought it up on the show before. And you may have seen it, but Duke University about a year, a year and a half ago at this point had put out a paper. that was looking at, if I remember correctly, because it was like a year and a half ago, it was looking at how much carbon could be prevented from going into the atmosphere and for what cost, economic cost, if they basically donated natural gas or propane burners to people

in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so that they would stop using wood fires to cook their food. Like, absolutely insane. You know, even if you just look at the map of the world in terms of CO2 emissions, either on a per capita or gross level, the Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn't register on the map. Like, it's gray. No matter what color is high, what color is low, like there's just no data for the DRC. And that's also not to mention that, you know, Duke University in itself probably emits much more. Yet they'd go out of their way. They probably emitted more more carbon in the creation of this paper than they would save by switching all of these these wood burning stoves to propane stoves like absolutely insane but this is what

Western academia even what would be considered to be liberal academia uh in this case you know caring about the environment this is what they focus on but of course it turns the focus onto places where we have high levels of, you know, quote unquote reproduction, where we have high levels of population growth, which at current time is in the global south, much of the global south, much of the global north is seeing population, declines or at least stagnation in terms of population. And we see a reemergence of Malthusian thinking, you know, hey, we just hit eight billion people. If we, this, this is eight billion. people. We're going to have the damage of 8 billion people on the planet, completely ignoring

the realities that these people do not contribute equally to the destruction of the natural world, and also that these people don't play similar roles in capital accumulation and economic growth, you know, even within a single society, the people within that society, and this is, of course, going back to a class analysis, these people do not play into the same roles in capital accumulation, which is really the driving factor for much of the destruction that's taking place. But, and I know that I'm being long-winded here, you're our guest, Jason, so I apologize. But one thing that you've pointed out before is that I always had the thought that

Malthusianism would be on the rise every time we see that there is, you know, hey, we hit this milestone of population. And I did see some when we hit 8 billion people. I just typed in population on, you know, Google trending and Twitter when the news came out that we hit 8 billion and there was a bunch of people like, ah, if there wasn't so many, and this is, you know, very grossly racist, if there wasn't so many, you know, people breeding, I even saw this term, in Africa, we wouldn't have the environmental degradation that we're seeing today, like absolutely obscenely racist rhetoric. But you pointed out that actually when we tend to see the biggest upswings in Malthusianism is when we have moments of the most profound anti-colonial and anti-imperial sentiment. And I think that this is an incredibly interesting aspect into this tendency towards Malthusian thinking. So if you can elaborate on that, I know, again, I apologize for the really long-winded introduction to that question. No, it's fantastic. And what your question indicates is that sustainable development is you meet the new boss, same as the old boss. It's the civilizing project again. And it is ultimately, and I think this is true, even for some tendencies on the left, a project of green austerity that is filtered through the ongoing terminal crisis of capitalism and the effort to borrow from Samir Amin, the effort of some elements of the ruling classes of the world to,

pursue a decadent transition rather than what would be a socialist transition, which would be a revolutionary one. And so I think, yes, precisely where you ended is so crucial. Let's remember Maltusianism is not strictly about numbers. And so for Maltus in the late 18th century, he actually didn't know what was going on demographically, but he didn't know what was happening politically. This was the moment of what was of a socialist movement or a proto-socialist movement led by a fellow named Spence. The English countryside was an open revolt against unfair food prices. The Irish were revolting in 1798 the same year as the first essay was published. Of course, there was this great fear of a Jacobin revolution, of a radicalization of the French Revolution.

This was the era of the Haitian revolution. So exactly. So he was aware of all of this. What was he trying to do in essence? He was using natural law to explain and justify inequality rather than exploitation and enclosure. So he was using natural law. I think that's the gist, the essence of the Maltusian and then Neo-Maltusian argument. This is true even before we have Maltus himself.

I think this is true in. the Lockean-Cartesian moment of the mid-17th century as well, in this era of profound revolt. And what do you have? You have the emergence of a new view of nature and a new regime of property that go hand in hand. And then after Malta's, a century after, what do you have? Eugenics. Eugenics at the moment of the scramble for Africa, the emergence of anti-imperialist movements across the colonial world, And then this is the era of the second industrial revolution in profound industrial working class unrest, culminating in the great social revolutions of Mexico and Russia.

So, and then when do you get Paul Ehrlich-style neomaltusianism? And we should credit Anne Ehrlich, because they wrote the book together in 1968, and it comes right out of their experience and their relationship to India, which was a battleground, which was really the India was the ideological and geographical battleground of the Cold War in many respects. And so they're writing in this moment of communist and socialist movements worldwide of workers beginning to radicalize and go out on strike. This is also the first signs of the falling rate of profit in places like the United States after the great postwar expansion. There's a lot that's going on. So, yes, of course, what do you need to do? You need to redefine the problems of the world in terms of man versus nature, which, A, lets capitalism off the hook. That's one part of it.

But it was also, remember, this is the moment of the world historical expansion of the white colors, what we now sometimes call the professional managerial class. And yes, not a class, but a cultural formation for sure. And that's really, so what we saw with that Maltusianism from 1968, which carries us all the way from spaceship earth into the popular Anthropocene, what we saw there was the formation for the first time of a mass basis for bourgeois hegemony that brought PMC liberals into the environmentalist fold. And we all know the history of American environmentalism and other environmentalisms in the

imperialist countries. They hated workers. If you were a farm worker poisoned, if you were in Louisiana's Cancer Alley, if you were a mine worker with black lung, you were shit out of luck. And that wasn't just a flaw of this environmentalism. It was a feature. It was a feature because the idea is you recreate the problems of man versus nature in an explicitly managerial way. That's what's with us today in the popular Anthropocene, which is basically just a straight-up rebranding,

with very little rethinking, by the way, a straight-up rebranding of spaceship Earth from the 60s and 70s. And whatever we want to make of Bucky Fuller, it's not Bucky Fuller who's really to blame for all of this, but this kind of systems dynamics thinking, which was all about the Cold War and winning a nuclear war with Russia, the systems dynamic thinking, which comes into play, it comes into everyone's imagination with the limits to growth in 1972, and it captures the imagination of so-called liberal environmentalists because it speaks directly to their anti-political, technocratic, managerial sensibilities of how to deal with planetary crisis. And how to deal with capitalism? It's like the capitalist managers suck. So what we really need are good scientific technocrats. This is a kind of Thorsten-Vebblin model of socialism that without workers' power and just like, well, we want enlightened technocrats to run everything.

Yeah, just a really quick note before I let Brett hop in is that, you know, I'm really glad that you brought up that Malthus himself wasn't looking at demographics and population data. That's why I mentioned that, you know, at least Neo-Malthusian thought. because, as you mentioned, it really does come up with the Ehrlichs and the population bomb. So, yeah, it's a really important note to make that, you know, this thought really did come forth in the 1960s rather than with Malthus himself in terms of gross population rather than, you know, rather than these other factors. Can we point out the demographics as a so-called science as an academic discipline is a wholly own subsidiary. of American imperialism. It was very much directly, immediately, even from the 30s and the work of the Rockefellers in China, but then increasingly with Ford Foundation in India, very much funded by

the American ruling class with an eye specifically to winning the anti-communist struggle. Feed him or fight him, as James Reston said in the New York Times in 1965. Yeah, another incredibly important note to make. So I do appreciate that. Brett, feel free to hop in. Yeah, no, I wanted to kind of circle back to something that you laid on the table earlier, and you mentioned, like, we could come back to this if you want, and I'm kind of very interested in this. And that's the, you said, like, climate shifts have been bad for ruling classes historically and the implications of our modern bourgeois ruling class.

And, of course, a lot of people think of it in some degree are correct in thinking that climate change, as we now know it, is unprecedented. This is a new problem, quote, unquote. But of course, there have been climatic shifts throughout history. history. You mentioned the little ice age, for example. We can go further back, of course, to the big ice age, but there's been other ones as well. So can you talk about, and you mentioned their ingrained agricultural systems is one of the main things that are very hard to change and adapt in the face of climate shifts. So can you talk about some of these historic climate shifts

and then kind of bring us up to present time and what it means perhaps for the bourgeoisie today? Absolutely. So I have a favorite example from the crisis of feudalism at the end of the 13th century. And so often we narrate the crisis of feudalism as man versus nature, which has the effect of basically saying peasants were too stupid to cultivate properly and to limit their fertility. That's not at all true. In fact, as the great French medievalist, Giebois says in the study of Normandy in the late 13th century, he says a different agrarian order was entirely possible. The peasants could have shifted towards diversified strategies. of grazing, growing fruits and vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. But the feudal landlord class structure compelled them to produce rye and wheat, especially wheat, for the market so that the lords

whose expenses and reproduction costs were rising, the lords could continue to reproduce their class power. So that's a great example of the violence of the Maltusian explanation and what a Marxist explanation of class and agriculture in the web of life can do for us. Now, one of the other consequences of the, there are so many consequences of man versus nature thinking, but it's essentially a climate doomism. So when Jason Box about a decade ago said on Twitter, we're fucked, he was expressing essentially the mindset of the scientist that sees only man versus nature and cannot imagine a more dynamic, creative, and flexible approach of human beings collectively organized to make their way in the world.

One of my favorite examples of that is what happened with the crisis of the Roman West in the 4th and 5th centuries. And we all know the story of the barbarians. And oh, by the way, the barbarians so-called brought an end to the greatest slaveholding society in human history to that point. So that's the first point. And second of all, they were moving into what is now Europe because of the worst drought over the past 2,000 years. So climate is part of that story. But to make a very long

story short, by the middle of the fifth century, the structures of Roman class power, the oligarchs and their villas, was breaking down in a major way. And peasants did something very, very creative and interesting. They reestablished village life, which have been largely destroyed by Roman class power across the previous centuries. They reestablished village life. They established what Chris Wickham calls a peasant mode of production. There were inequality, sure, but not classes. Men and women lived much more equally, and you can tell there's so much great archaeology, you can tell longer periods of breastfeeding, which had been discouraged under Roman rule, and you can see it in the hypoplasia or streaks in their teeth, things like that. But you can see that what

happened was a long-term managed decline of population. And something very interesting happened. people even under this was during a period called the dark ages cold period roughly between 450 and 750 and peasant's grew healthier they grew taller and stronger in this period compared to the era of roman hegemony why because they don't have the the boot heel of the roman oligarchs in their neck there was the the human collective possibility of recreate the conditions of production and reproduction in the web of life in that moment. So the tagline to all of this is that unfavorable climate crises, and that's really imprecise, but usually that means either very cold in the northern hemisphere, or it means

very strong droughts in the mid-latitudes. But very bad climate shifts, in that sense, unfavorable climate shifts are bad for ruling classes, ultimately because they destabilize agriculture as a class process. All right. So let's fast forward to what's going on now. If we look at, amongst other recent studies, Bobea Ortiz and her colleagues in the journal Nature Climate Change have demonstrated that fully eight years of agricultural productivity growth have been lost as a result of what they call climate yield suppression.

I've written quite a bit about this. It can't be reduced to a Maltusian moment, but that tells us something fundamental. that at the heart of capitalism's metabolism, and I would suggest that the metabolism of any class society is agriculture, which is structured by class, and which locks in the possibilities and locks out other possibilities for adjustment. It locks in the imperative to stay on that course and locks out the possibilities for flexible adjustments on an agro-ecological model, et cetera. So then the question becomes, okay, when is the crisis going to hit, not if? And then what are the likely ruling class reactions? And for that, I think we can go back to, say,

the crisis of feudalism, where the agricultural surplus stopped growing and everything else stopped in an economic sense stopped growing. So you had to find a fix to that problem. And that's where we are today, I think. Yeah. Interesting. I just wanted to pick up a little bit on this issue of agriculture and maybe even extend our time frame even further. I mean, you've talked a little bit about late Roman breakdown and late antiquity. You know, there's this orientation within some people doing world history and agrarian studies, you know, like James Scott, you know, who has looked at the agricultural revolution as the real beginning source point. for a different kind of Anthropocene, you know, kind of time period, a really deep one of, you know,

basically arguing that you can't have large-scale state structures, you know, emerge until you have this agricultural revolution because now you've got cereal and grain production, you know when it happens, and the big problem for states and exploitation in the past was always, you know, how do you find the product and the people to tax them and to expropriate, you know, that surplus? And so, you know, it seems, you know, would you agree that that is a, you know, that puts in place a kind of structure or system that within which climate shifts have opened up these possibilities to, you know, for radical, you know, like either the peasants movement in late, you know, 1381, the. the English Rising or, you know, that these moments, but that that's the sort of base structure until you get to the capitalist scene that you've been talking about. I mean, how much does prehistory actually factor at all, you know, in this, in this sort of perspective? And are there

lessons besides those that you've pointed out for late Roman collapse and late feudal collapse in the long-dure history of, you know, the web of life and world ecology? Well, I think, first of all, the long-dure history tells us that climate crises are moments of political possibility, and therefore that, yes, while today's climate crisis is unprecedented, it is also an unprecedented moment of socialist possibility. Now, whether or not we're going to take advantage of that, well, that's what we're all working on right now. Now, the even longer history, Scott's book is very interesting and full of insights. I find it unsatisfying because it ultimately remains a kind of social reductionist story. There is a very influential, into my mind, very persuasive thesis about the Holocene, which is this long era of unusual climate stability that began 11,700 years ago. It's a Maltusian thesis, but it's absolutely brilliant. It's by a fellow named Ruddeman. And it's called the Ruddaman hypothesis or the rudiment argument.

And essentially what he says is that the development of agriculture carbonizes the atmosphere and methanizes the atmosphere and thereby prevents a very rapid return to a new glaciation. So in contrast to previous interglacial periods, the Holocene, the one that we're in, is a very, very long and unusually stable one. essentially because agriculture and methanization and then much, much later, other forms of carbonization stabilize the climate and counteract the tendency for atmospheric carbon to be absorbed into the ground. Well, it turns out when you look very closely at Redmond's inflection point, it's the dawn of class society and the dawn of class society, which follows, as you just said, the dawn of agriculture. Now, when and where we have class society, what's a stratified society versus what's a class society, how much is urbanization part of it? Those are all more detailed questions that, yes, I'd be happy to talk about.

But really, here's the punchline that the emergence of class society forms a kind of archimedean lever for global population and global trade networks and global economic activities, including the extension of more agriculture, that stabilizes. the Holocene. So there's some sense in which if we want to talk about the age of man, which I think we should not, because it's very dangerous, we should go back to the dawn of class society. That's why I don't like it when people like Tim Morton, who as near as I can tell, knows nothing about history, talks about an agro scene. No, it's not an, that's a classic instance of a kind of substance fetishism where we're going to try to get closer to the earth to define the era, which is absolutely misleading and political. dangerous. It is the long history of class society. Now, what's interesting is that

bourgeois environmental historians, like John McNeil, the dean of American environmental history, I was just on a panel discussion with him, and he uses that longer history of class society as a way to say, well, capitalism isn't all that different. And I say the hell it isn't. And look at the unprecedented character of the climate crisis. And let me just tack this on. at the end because it might be useful for our discussion. I mentioned climate doomism. The climate models that we have that invoke people like the UN Secretary General to say we're facing an existential threat, they all have to assume those climate models all have to assume capitalism in its existing state continues. And in my opinion, that's an entirely untenable position

and that we're in the midst of a transition from capitalism to something else that could well be a class society. It could be socialism, but there are definite projects in mind from the World Economic Forum, from Washington, D.C., from China, as well, to engineer a post-capitalist world-class society of some kind, to deal with climate change. Right. Okay. You know, that's very interesting, and maybe it does fall. I had a follow-up thought here to ask you about, which gets back to your, you know, cautious optimism about this as a moment and possibility for political change, which is you said something in one of these articles that I found interesting and wanted to ask you about capital must, or was it capitalism, must exhaust the biospheric

conditions of capital accumulation. And where I read that is like, wow, how incredibly dangerous it is. You are also locating, however, this as the opportunity that it has to try and you know, exhaust that. And that pushes the system into a position where the climate change opens up opportunities for contestation. So I just wanted to ask you, what kind of an optimist are you? What do you see as the optimistic moment there in that very doom-like sounding statement that you made? So exhaustion doesn't mean the absolute zeroing out of a substance. It means the exhausting of the relations and the substances that allow for capital to continue accumulating on the model of the past five centuries. Here's what makes my argument not a catastrophist argument, because

catastrophism is everywhere, and it's always the danger of after Hitler comes us, right? So the capitalists are going to show that they can't manage the crisis, and then there's going to be a socialist revolution. I think that's misleading and dangerous. And there are a lot of folks on the left who argue that. Now, I think what's happening is that elements, of the world bourgeoisie who are not united, and we should be skeptical of a Kautzian temptation, but there are major blocks that are looking towards a post-capitalist transition in an era ravaged by climate crisis.

This is the rise of what I think the Salvation Collective calls the natural security state. And that's a very good riff, and some of us might remember when Abby Martin asked Nancy Pelosi at the Edinburgh cop meetings about climate, crisis, and she basically gave that answer. Well, it's a security problem. That's how the United States is looking at this moment. I think that the war in Ukraine is a climate war, not in the sense that climate is the proximate factor, but that the overall climate crisis complex is related to a

fundamental stagnation and capital accumulation, which is revealed, as I suggested, in the stagnation of agricultural productivity growth, but also, as we know as Jason Smith and Eric Bonanov and others have clarified very well, a long-run labor productivity stagnation that is not resolvable simply through new rounds of automation. So there is a fundamental stagnation at the core of capitalism's accumulation engine, if you will, that then is manifesting in increasingly militarized forms of intervention. So as I like to say about the popular Anthropocene, it was coined 2000, 2001. The U.S. has been continuously at war since 2001.

The United States has special forces units operative in three quarters of the world's countries. So the American vision for a post-capitalist world is already set. Now, where does the optimism come from? The optimism is that wars are not good for political stability. This was true at the end of this long cold 17th century when Cromwell discovered after having cut off the head of Charles I, that he had a proletarian army outside, camped outside of London, full of communists, of levelers, and they were called communists at the time without the commune part. And so we know this, that as the possibilities for the enlargement of the world, of world, of world. surplus value begin to stagnate, what happens? The states go to war. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the present moment. That is a profoundly destabilizing geopolitical moment

that is also deeply corruptive of the underlying bases of stability within the imperialist countries, never mind across the global south. So I think that one way to read that that summary of my view is that exhaustion in a dialectical and relational sense, leads to political instability because the exhaustion is also the exhaustion of the underlying basis of class peace. You can't go for a treaty of Detroit anymore to say, well, we're going to increase productivity by 50 percent and wages by 25 percent, and everybody's going to get a little. Well, what happens when the pie stops growing? And there's a history to this. And I think that's why, if you hear any frustration as well as excitement in my voice, it's because it's not just the post-structuralist left,

It's the Marxist left that's engaged in a flight from history and they don't want to deal with the historical questions and antecedents that we so desperately need to have a politics of socialist hope and practice in the present. Yeah, I'll just jump in really quick to say that, unfortunately, I do have to leave the conversation, of course, to listeners will continue to go on. I just want to say, Jason, I love this conversation. I love your work. I'm really looking forward to you coming back on guerrilla history at the turn of the new year to discuss a history of the world and seven cheap things. And I really appreciate all your insights here. It's really fascinating. Just to do a quick plug, only because it's related to what we're talking about.

I have another show called Red and Menace where we cover certain theoretical texts of various sorts. And we just covered a nihilist and anti-siv anarchist text called Desert, which has so many of these strains. Of course, we're brutally critical of it, but so many of these interesting strains that we're discussing, but from an ostensibly left revolutionary ideology. So I think that's worth noting. And then as I leave, though, I just am kind of interested. Have you ever engaged at all with the book, Climate Leviathan, where those authors kind of think out four major possible trajectories that can come out of the climate crisis? And if so, do you have any quick thoughts on that?

So when you write a man are brilliant. In fact, I blurb the book. So if you flip it over, you'll see I say nice things about it. I think it's an important contribution. I think it's not very historical. I think that it is, it missed an opportunity to really investigate what the Maoist and Stalinist projects did accomplish, which was not nothing. So there's a kind of left academic antistatism that goes on. And I'm, I'm, as you can tell, very heterodox. So I'm not one of these people

to say that, well, Cuba was the model, Soviet Union was the model, China was the model. We need to be heterodox and realize that all have vital contributions. This is the so-called left, but it's not a left critique at all. But the critical critique of the capitalist scene, everybody says, well, what about the Soviet Union? What about China? They were just as bad, some version of that statement, which one is empirically false. And two is a case of ignoring that the Soviet Union was under threat of total annihilation by imperialist powers for its entire existence. And so was China during its period of socialist transition. Of course, that's long since past. And that these are states with a fundamental contribution to human well-being and I would say extra-human well-being as well

in the 20th century. It was not until the Soviet Union was overthrown. The full-blown neoliberal repacity spreads across the global south with its horrific. environmental consequences. So I think that for so often academics don't actually want to touch the experiences of state socialism to realize that the history of, this is the history of transition. This is something that like Jodi Dean and Kai Heron have really pinpointed in discussing climate Leninism. Regardless what you think Leninism might be or not, they say, look, you have to have a

politics of transition. What's the politics of transition for state socialist projects in the 20th century? It's facing an enemy whose motto is, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. So you can't have a transition. You can't have a revolution if you can't defend the sovereignty of that piece of land. And so many of these sort of left-wing PMC intellectuals pretend that that's not something we need to deal with. And oh, by the way, it's not just China and the Soviet Union. look at what happened to the second Wilson government in 74 to 76 in Great Britain,

which was overthrown by an MI5, MI6, CIA, IMF, sorry for the alphabet soup comment, a movement where they're like, no, we got to make sure that a left-wing social democratic government doesn't radicalize, which it was very much teetering on the brink of radicalizing under sort of Tony Ben and extending nationalization, extending cooperative worker control and basic industry. that was not to be tolerated. And the mindset of a lot of respectable critical intellectuals on these questions is totally inadequate. And so I love Jeff Mann. I love Joel Wainwright. I think the book is important. And I think that it ignores these questions that have to be addressed.

Brilliant stuff. I could not agree more. I look so forward to talking with you again, Jason. Thank you so much. Likewise. Thank you, Brett. How can the listeners find you and your other podcast, Brett, as you're on your way out? Go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com and find everything I do.

Great. All right. Take care, Brett. We'll continue the conversation for a little bit without you, but we definitely want to, I mean, I was going to say we want to save plenty for the future conversations, but my goodness, we could just talk for ages and we would still have much to talk about. I do want to just pick up on a point that you were mentioning Jason before I shift to my next question, which is that many of these, you know, quote unquote, left academics. And I'm not, you know, outright criticizing the authors of climate leviathan, but more more of making a general statement about left academia in the West, that they completely ignore the material conditions of socialist states and the pressures that were exerted on them. I mean, it's a complete lack of historical materialist analysis of social estate projects. And that's one of the reasons why I always point people to the episode that we did of

guerrilla history with my friend and collaborator, Salvatore Engel de Mauro, on social estates and the environment, which is a really great book that, you know, does address most of these topics. And I know I was just talking with Salvatore yesterday, actually, and he was really looking forward to this episode with you, Jason. So if you ever want to be connected with him, that's, you know, something I can definitely set up. Absolutely.

Salvatore is brilliant. Yeah, he's great. The book is a signal contribution. Yeah, absolutely agree. our episode, just, you know, to plug it again for the listeners, it's almost three hours long. So it's a very long conversation, but like really, really chock full of important explanation and, you know, discussion in my opinion. And Salvatore is just a lovely man as well.

And just to plug something else, he is co-editing a new translation with me of Lucerto's Stalin book. And so when this episode comes out, we're in the final stage of edits. right now. So it'll be coming out imminently, either a low-cost physical copy or a free PDF from Peaceland and Bread in their imprint Iskra books. So that's something for people to check out. But in any case, to shift topics a little bit and to get into something a little bit nerdy, since this is still an introductory episode, and this is something that people that are perhaps slightly involved in the debates and discussions around environmental theory,

and environmental history. They have seen it, but, you know, this is particularly for people who are not specialists in this, is metabolic rift theory. So metabolic rift theory is something that you write about a little bit and other authors, which I'm sure that you'll bring up some of them, write about a lot. And I'm just going to paraphrase you briefly because I think that you really say it nicely in this quote that I wrote down with regard to metabolic rift theory. You say topics such as agriculture, global warming, and resource consumption loom large. This is within metabolic Rift theory. But to stop there and to treat the accumulation of capital and capitalism's remaking of human natures as exogenous is to miss the greatest premise of the metabolic Rift perspective, the transition from environmental histories of to capitalism as environmental history.

I think that this is two important points. So the first point would be what is metabolic Rift theory for people who are unaware of it? because I think that's probably going to be most of the listeners. You know, I was only made aware of it within the last year and a half maybe. So, like, you know, I'm not that far off myself. I'm definitely not an expert in it. And also, how do people that utilize metabolic Rift theory within their analyses, do what you're saying here, miss the greatest promise of utilizing the metabolic Rift perspective?

How do they miss that opportunity and what are the, the, you know, what's the follow-out from missing that opportunity? Well, the concept of metabolic rift, it was offered by John Bellamy Foster in his groundbreaking re-reading of Marx historical materialism. There's a wonderful book called Marxist Ecology that was published in 2000 by Monthly Review Press. It's worth reading. He writes well and elegantly. He is, I think, nearly unparalleled as a kind of historian of Marx's thought and teasing out some of its very robust implications. And he called it Marx's ecology. I was a student and a friend of his for many years and until

the past little bit, and we can get into that in just a moment. But he calls it Marx's ecology instead of Marx and ecology because he came to see quite properly that thinking about the web of life was fundamental to Marx's critique of class society and to his formulation of historical materialism. And there's a famous passage from Marx deep into capital three where Marx speaks of an irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of the social metabolism. That's more or less a direct quote. So what's important there is that a rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism,

does not mean a separation of nature and society. Because what Bellamy Foster demonstrates, and this is where I pick up and I really saw and continue to see much of what I am doing as a dialectical extension of the work that Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Richard Levinz and Richard Lewinson, Carolyn Merchant, and other figures opened up in the 80s and 90s. James O'Connor is another fundamental figure, is that if we are going to conceptualize class society, we have to take seriously the opening paragraphs of the German ideology where they're introducing historical materialism, Marx and Ingalls are, where they say, we have to pay attention not only to physical bodies in their inner relations, but to their relation with climate and with geography

and to the subsequent transformation of environments through classes. society, which, of course, is through work. And this says that metabolism is a methodological premise to understand the class formation or a transition or the emergence of capitalism or, for that matter, the transition to communism, whatever that might mean for people. This is, so there was a tension from the beginning in Bellamy Foster's thinking. I took him to mean that the web of life was indeed central to Marx's conception and mode of production of capital, of class society, of proletarianization and bourgeoisification, et cetera, et

et cetera. That is, a Marxist in this light would no more abstract the web of life from the mode of production than the Marxist would abstract class from the mode of production. And I think that there's a strong argument to be said that Marx was indeed thinking in this way. And Marx has a lot of rifts that run throughout his corpus of labor as a specifically harness natural force. Or he's arguing with the German socialist in the critique of the Goethe program towards the end of his life. The German socialists say, well, labor is a source of all wealth. And Mark says, well, wait a minute. You know, the nature is also a source of wealth. And he criticizes, there's a wonderful word that Marx uses in criticizing the German socialist

reliance on labor. He says, you essentially endowed labor with supernatural powers. And so what is he's saying there. He's saying that we have to be historically situated and we have to understand that it's labor in the web of life and webs of life and labor that are the relational nexus through which to understand the emergence and development of class society. All right. So and actually, as I've said at many different points, not only was the formulation of the bookmarks of ecology, but the original, I don't know if it's a theory or not, but the concept of metabolic rift. It's absolutely ground-breaking and pioneering opened up fundamental questions that in Foster's original conception were rooted in the law of value. But what happened after that was a typical

movement in the history of academic leftism, which is they turned it into a model. And the model was basically a soil exhaustion model that said something like this. Substances, resources, nutrients go from a mine or go from an agricultural field into the cities and then they're not recycled. So there's a rift like a separation. There's a breakdown in the closed circuit of sustainable reproduction. The soil nutrients aren't returned from the city into the fields. Well, that's not necessarily bad, but if we leave it at that, then it becomes separated. So the metabolic moment then becomes separated from the class formation moment, then becomes separated from the capital moment. And so I began to wrestle with this quite a bit. And I put it together with Paul Burkett's wonderful book, which is called, I believe, Marx and Nature, or something to very close to that effect. It's also a brilliant book. And it's about how value is all Marx's conception of value and the law of value is already unfolding with and within webs of life. So for me, I saw myself taking those two arguments out of metabolism and metabolic rift and trying to push it forward for a more radical sort of ecologization, if you will, of historical materialism.

Now, and so what happened for Foster and his group, and I tried to nudge them, and I asked them to debate, and I asked them to debate again, and I asked them to debate again, and that went on for years, and there was total radio silence. I said, and finally, my last note to Bellamy Foster was, please, John, we had known each other by this point for almost 20 years. I said, please, John, these kinds of tensions within socialism and socialist thought can get really ugly. Let's look for a different way. No, to total radio silence or I'm too busy. We can't do that.

And then my book comes out and all of a sudden I'm a friend of the climate deniers. So it's a very, that tells us something about, I think, what is happening in socialist intellectual culture in the present moment? And I'm not sure I can tease out all the implications. But here is, so if people are expecting me to bag on and dump on Bellamy Foster, I'm not going to do that except to say sectarianism is not going to help us generate the ideas that are necessary. The answer to your question, long story, very, very short is that the class dynamics and the law of value dynamics and the capital accumulation dynamics simply were not present in metabolic rift analyses for about 15 years. Only after I

raised those questions, did they rediscover all of this? And they said, oh, what do you know? Value. Now, Monday Review, this is how absurd. I want everybody to appreciate how absurd this is. Monday Review is now running articles saying how a correct view of value matters. Does Bellamy Foster remember Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy? This is not an orthodox view of value. This is a heterodox view, and we can argue about whether Sweezy and Baran were actually abandoning value or whether they were simply sort of peeling the onion to get to the core of what was going on in late Monopoly capitalism.

Okay, but don't tell me that monthly review is the bearer of Marxist orthodoxy. Are you fucking kidding me? And so there's a kind of weird pathology that's going on. around apostasy and blasphemy and the one true correct line that's very, very strange. Well, you know, not to perhaps pull on more of these threads of strange sectarianisms that seem to be provoked or stimulated by the thesis that you're making here. But I noticed that, you know, you're not the only person who, you know, would identify capitalism as the crucial paradigm through which you have to understand the present climate crisis

and, you know, how we've gotten to where we are. But it doesn't seem as if there's always necessarily been a productive interplay and conversation. I mean, I'm thinking here also of Andreas Malm's sort of views on, I guess, early 19th century fossil sort of energy as the sort of real turning point. So maybe one would say that's that 1830 kind of capitalist scene that really looks at the modernity and modern capitalism as an outcome of those changes and events. What's your difference really quite apart from identifying 1492 in this kind of wider global process that happens? happens, you know, what's the basis for the kinds of disagreement that you have in approach

and analysis? And what are the implications of it? Yeah, I'm an admirer of Andreas's work. Andreas hates me, but I'm an admirer of Andreas's work, and I often say very nice things about Mount's arguments. So there are at least two major differences. One is a difference over substance fetishism, and the theory of fossil capital, and you can look at the diagram, and it says a very, indicates this very clearly. He drops coal or fossil fuel into the middle of Marx's diagram of capital. That's a substance fetishism. The origins of resource economics, not even Marx's economics, was summarized by a fellow named Zimmerman in the 1930s and 40s. He says, resources are not, they become. It's a very Hegelian statement. But it's

absolutely true. So coal had been around for a very long time. The Romans called it Britain's best stone. The Chinese burned it, but it was very far away from the dominant centers of industry. So coal is just a rock in the ground. It becomes a fossil fuel under definite historical and geographical conditions and class relations. So I'm not sure, I think, so that's one difference. There's a substance fetishism difference. There's also, of course, a difference of historical periodization. But Maum is writing from a particular kind of Trotskyist position that has, and I'm sorry for all my Trotskyist comrades out there, has been historically weak on the question of imperialism. And that's very much reflected in the

fossil capital book. I see many people who style themselves as quite woke endorsing fossil capitalism, which is an old-fashioned Anglo-centric, never mind Eurocentric, Anglo-centric text, which says it all comes down to the English countryside and class struggles in the English countryside. And no, it does not. And indeed, this is not a recent development that historians have been pointing out the centrality of the slave trade and the plantation revolutions in the Industrial Revolution. It goes all the way back to Eric Williams in the 1940s. And surely before then. So to ignore that is deeply problematic because it suggests a kind of methodological nationalism that's entirely inappropriate for the political and methodological challenges of the era of climate crisis.

But what we share is a viewpoint of broadly speaking of class struggle in the web of life. And I've said this publicly and written on this publicly. What's, again, it's what's unsaid. So that part is very, very unsatisfying. That there remains the sectarianism. Now, the other part, and maybe some of there are some who are in the know about all this, is that Malm goes around the world saying that I'm a follower of Bruno Latour. And that's a very strange argument to make.

Not only do I never write about Latour, I think Lutour maybe said some nice things. We have never been modern, had some insightful moments. But there's nothing in what I do that bears any resemblance at all to Lutour. So this goes to the heart of a kind of anti-examine. intellectual sectarianism that we've seen on the left, really, I mean, it goes back for as long as there been leftists, which is, and especially amongst Marxists, they like to say you're not really a Marxist. And there's one thing that I'm never going to say about Mom or Foster or any of these people, which is they're not real Marxists. They're Marxists as they see fit. They're

historical Marxists. They are men of their times. And let's allow them to use marks in the ways that they want to use marks, but let's not make up reasons of critique. And this is absolutely flabbergasting to see a mountain go after me on the basis that I'm a Latourian when the first 50 pages of my capitalism in the web of life is an explicit critique of Latour. And it doesn't dwell on the point, but it's very clear that what I'm arguing against and for the uninitiated Latour basically argues that capitalism doesn't exist, that it's a discursive formation, and that there are no durable centers of power in the modern world. Everything is just shifting, and so what we need is a flat ontology where everything is created

equal, a democratic theory of causation, if you will, all of which I've spent a lifetime arguing against. So we have to there interrogate, why is it that committed and principled socialist or otherwise principled socialist in other areas of life like Malma and Foster are behaving in this way. We need to turn the tools of historical materialism on to Marxist sectarianism, I think. Yeah, fabulous. I know I have many, many more topics and questions written down, but knowing that we're going to be bringing you back, definitely at least one more time in the very near future, but probably

twice because we've had two very good ideas come up in recent times for how to continue the conversation, but take some different threads with different perspectives coming in as well, I think that we should leave it here for now. So again, listeners, our guest was Jason W. Moore, Environmental Historian and Historical Geographer at Binghamton University, author of many books. Like I said, you should just Google Jason W. Moore, find all of his books. But if you want to prepare for one of the next conversations that we will have with Jason, pick up a history of the world in Seven Cheap Things, co-authored with Raj Patel, Jason, it was really a pleasure having you on the show.

I've been, like I said, before we started recording, and I think at the beginning of the recording, I've been an admirer of your work for quite some time, and I believe I have digital copies of all of your books, and I would like to have physical copies of all of them, but because of my physical location at the moment, it's really hard for me to get physical books over here, but it was really a pleasure having you on the show. can you let the listeners know where they can find you, your website, your Twitter, and if you're working on anything right now that you would like them to keep their eyes out for? Well, keep your eyes open for all of these arguments coming out in book form, especially

about climate crises, historically, the possibilities for socialism, the crisis of capitalism. There will be a book out sometime in the next year. I'm still putting the final touches on all of that, you can find almost everything I've written on my website, which is jasonwmore.com. And you can find me on Twitter on Oikaios, which is a funny spelling, but put Jason W. Moore in there, and I'm sure you'll find it. You can find my comrades and I in the World Ecology Research Network on academia.edu and other platforms. And so, and if people are really burning to talk with me about something. You can always email me and my email address is on the website. I'm easy to find. Thank you. Henry Adnan, what a treasure, what a treat it's been to be

able to talk with you for the past hour and a half. I just hope you had as much fun as I did because I really had a great time. All right. So Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcasts and close? Well, first also just to echo, how interesting and productive, I think, the conversation was. We could have gone on and on, and I'm so excited that at least we'll be able to have a chance to continue because I think you're basically taking on the big key issues we have to be thinking about now with a fresh and interesting analysis, and I so much appreciate the materialist component and really bringing history back in as the key methodology, really. That's what we have as a resource, and that's what this podcast

is about is that we really only have, as dialectical materialists, the evidence of history available to us in order to guide us through these major transitions and to try and seek the opportunity for liberation in a better world. So your work is just really, I think, going to profoundly affect people. I thank you for it and thank you for coming on to talk a little bit more about it. I look forward to continuing conversations and also to continuing work that we will always be encouraging listeners to read. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein and also listen to my other podcast, The Mudgellis. If you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim diasporas, we do episodes every once in a while on topics related to that.

So do check it out. And thanks so much. And just a reminder, listeners, it's the Mudgellus podcast that is not hosted by Radio Free Central Asia. It's the one from the Muslims. what, let me see, MSGP. So Muslim Society Global Perspective Project at Queen's University. Did I get that right, Adnan? You got it.

Woo-hoo. Okay. Definitely check that out. I learn a lot from Adnan's other podcast. And before I tell you where you can find me, I also, I'm not sure we mentioned it during this episode, but for listeners that are interested in more of those discussions about Anthropocene and Capitocene, Jason has an edited collection titled Anthropocene or Capitalisine with a bunch of essays.

in it that pick apart these different topics. So that's, if that was something that from this conversation that was particularly interesting to you, then do pick up that book came out a few years ago. Listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. You can follow Gorilla history on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-I-L-L-A with 2-R-U-R-U-S underscore pod. And you can support the show on Patreon, which definitely, definitely helps us keep up and running. And we have a lot of ideas for how to expand the show.

So, you know, once we are able to kind of more establish ourselves, we're still a relatively young show, get some more external funding because we are funded only by listeners. We don't have any sponsorships or advertisements or anything like that. We do have some very fun ideas for how to expand the show. You can do that at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.