Rev Left Radio - A People's Green New Deal: Colonialism, Cochabamba, and Climate Change

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Max Ajl, sociologist and author, joins Breht to discuss his book "A People's Green New Deal".  Topics Discussed: the liberal Green New Deal, the history of colonialism, eco-modernism, climate reparations, the Cochabamba's Peoples Agreement, degrowth, ecosocialism, agroecology, the national question, Green Capitalism, and much more.  Max's work: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Max-Ajl Max's Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxajl Max's Book: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341750/a-peoples-green-new-deal/ Check out my co-host on Guerrilla History Henry Hakamaki's interview with Max here (time stamp: 6:23:52): https://davidfeldmanshow.com/kamala-harris-do-not-come-home-episode-1246/ Outro Music: "Dead Buffalos" by C-Rayz Walz ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have the wonderful Max Isle on to talk about his latest book, A People's Green New Deal. We cover the book, so many topics within it, the national question, agroecology, the importance of anti-imperialism, and decolonial struggles in the fight against the climate crisis, et cetera, really essential reading for anybody particularly, on the Marxist left, but anybody on the left broadly that really wants to take seriously

how we can confront the climate crisis in a just and equitable way and in the process, you know, address the legacies of imperialism and colonialism imposed on the global south. So this is a really crucial work. I cannot recommend it enough. I think it's essential reading. And there's also lots of other interviews and the little ecosystem of the principled left podcast. that I really like, and so you can check out more of those interviews. I know millennials are killing capitalism, has a wonderful interview with Max, Groundings, East is a podcast, This Is Hell, all of them have interviews with Max, and they all emphasize different things, ask different questions.

So if you really like this episode, go check out and support all those other podcasts. This little media ecosystem on the Marxist left, the decolonial left, the anti-imperialist left, is a beautiful thing. And it's important that if you're on that left to support it in whatever ways you can, even if that's just liking and subscribing to these podcasts, so definitely do that. My good friend Henry, my co-host on Guerrilla History, also has interviewed Max on the David Feldman show. So you can go and seek that out as well. Henry's always wonderful and always asks deep cutting questions.

So check that out for sure. But yeah, without further ado, let's get into this wonderful. episode with Max Isle on his book, A People's Green New Deal. I'm Max Isle. I am a poet at the university's world sociology department, a long-time researcher in agrarian and development issues, especially in the time activist around Palestine and broader anti-imperialist work. And I'm the author of a recent book, The People's Green deal. Absolutely. It's an honor and a pleasure to have you on the episode. I really love the book. I recommend it to everybody that I can. It's really essential reading for anybody, especially on

the Marxist left, who want to really grapple with what it would mean for a just and equitable addressing of the climate crisis. So let's just get into it. Can you talk about the reasons for writing this book and sort of what you wanted to accomplish with it? Sure. So the basic impetus behind writing the book was that it was clear very immediately with the announcement of the Green New Deal on the heels of this kind of incantation of this mirage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an extremely high-profile and influential politician well outside of her actual experience, that there was kind of a constellation of factors that were shifting in U.S. domestic politics in a way that was not entirely productive.

I mean, one, she did very successfully manage to put a certain type of green politics on the agenda. But the shape of that green politics was not what it was being sold as, which was part of this broader problem of Ocasio-Cortez being sold as something that she herself admitted not to being. I mean, Ocasio-Cortez was very broadly represented

as this democratic socialist figure, which itself, democratic socialism, this is this kind of very amorphous phenomenon that really is totally unmoored now from fixed political coordinates, fixed historical experiences, and so forth. And she would say, well, in some ways, I am a socialist and in other ways I'm not.

She was, I don't want to say she was kind of transparently, clear, pollucid, articulate about, what exactly she was, but she didn't pretend to be this kind of person oriented towards even a parliamentary road to socialism. Never mind, actually, any more radical or anti-systemic options. And then that was kind of her Green New Deal was grafted onto that, even though her Green New Deal is not very eco-socialist at all. But you had a wide array of people and writers on the Green Left claiming that this was a radical socialist green new deal, it was relatively close to eco-socialism,

and that with Bernie getting into office, we would suddenly have on the agenda a program for a more transformative climate action. Now, of course, none of this panned out remotely, right? It was clear that there was no capacity for Bernie, really, to get into office. I mean, the structure of U.S. capitalism was not going to allow someone like Bernie with all his limits. to achieve office. And even if he had achieved office,

he would have been totally prevented from putting in place any bit of his program, absent actual grassroots mobilization around far more radical horizons, right? But this wasn't the only issue. I mean, I encountered a kind of cognitive or institutional blockade from getting some of these criticisms out.

I mean, it's not really, it's kind of superfluous to name the very institutions because it was all of them, right? Everyone's like, well, we don't really think it's useful to, like, really get into the weeds. of the Ocasio-Cortez-Grinudio. And this was fundamentally opportunist in orientation, right? These institutions were like, okay, well, you know,

we don't mind that she's going to talk left and walk right. This isn't the time to kind of impose some kind of sectarians, but I was like, well, you know, we're not a position to do any sort of sectarian splitting. I just want to identify what the actual phenomenon of Ocasio-Cortez is, the contradictions that exist within the thoroughly NGOized environmental movement, and blind spots, namely around climate. and anti-imperialism and agriculture that are actually present in a lot of the NGOI's green left discourse

and also the political discourse of a lot of the Eurocentric North American green environmental journalism and democratic socialist politics. So I was kind of like, okay, well, if I can't get my perspective, essentially I was like, if I can't get my perspective out through some articles, I'm going to write a book. and I, you know, I had relatively good relations with David Schumann of Pluto, and I was like, what do you think about this? He said, yes, send me a proposal. So I just got going on it, you know, put other projects aside. I said, this is very important. It's very important that people on the, you know, communist left or on the anti-imperious left, on a left that wants to build with a full spirit of internationalism and respect and egalitarianism with respect to the global south,

who wants to take care of the agrarian world, who wants to have like a serious engagement with the need to take care of the ecosystem through land management and so forth. It's important that we have some intellectual resources of our own. So I started reading more extensively through a lot of the available literature and just kind of synthesized it. I mean, it's not, you know, I don't think it's groundbreaking theoretically in any way, shape, or form. I mean, it's just building on a lot of work other people have done and putting it in a more compact form.

Yeah, it's a great synthesis and an essential intervention in these sort of discussions. And on that level, it's really, you know, necessary for people to read. And I really appreciate it and it was much needed. So let's talk about the Green New Deal a little bit because as you stayed in your book, and I think a lot of people might not totally understand this, but the term Green New Deal is not necessarily like a single, well-defined policy proposal, but rather more of a broad, if often vague, set of ideas that manifest differently

in different countries and context. So can you talk about the liberal Green New Deal proposals broadly and sort of how they perpetuate capitalist accumulation and whose interests they ultimately serve? Right. So the Green New Deal first, it goes back quite a while, right? It goes back to the late first decade, the later part of the first decade of the 2000.

So now it actually, it's almost on our match, that we're talking like 14 years ago, that Thomas Friedman, of course, this kind of Eurocentric bacteria, first put forward this idea of a green new deal, right? And it was kind of taken up by a variety of labor organizations, very kind of kinsured proposals were being put forth by kind of the big green environmental NGOs and foundations

like National Resource Defense Council World Wildlife Fund in concert with some of the major labor organizations for the pilot program, kind of Van Jones, who is not discussed, Marboe was kind of a major figure on this kind of left liberal kind of green left. It's a bit different, I think, from a kind of what now passes for a social democratic green left. We're kind of putting forth this idea of a kind of green reinvigoration of the U.S. economy based on a partial reindustrialization around renewable technologies and a kind of shoring up of the domestic

social pact, which was already unraveling. This kind of whole discourse, is clapsed. And then in many ways, it was resurrected in many ways in substantively in the same form. It through Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, which of course is not anti-capital, right? It calls for heavy, it calls for kind of community state partnerships. It calls for community state corporate partnerships. It calls for the U.S. to become a green tech leader. In other words, the U.S. to kind of reassume technological leadership within the world's system on the basis of being an exporter of renewable technology, because the U.S. still has a massive intellectual, defense, industrial base. Of course, it could do this. I don't think it would be very good for the world.

And, of course, there's, that was, in so far as that was taken as a reference point or a touchstone for subsequent left discussion, which it very much was. This was, in fact, I think pernicious for a couple reasons. I mean, first of all, that the earlier discussion about climate debt coming from 2010 in Cojabamba, and also that was the fruit of worldwide mobilization within the climate justice movement, that was suppressed and censored and erased, right? That was totally omitted from the conversation. And now it's slowly being brought back, but often in the much more kind of malleable or the much more acceptable form of a discussion about kind of debt cancellation. Actually, climate debt is much more expansive, and people should keep in mind that this is a poison

pill, this idea of merely debt cancellation, even though it seems utopian, this is a standard for the actual radical demand of climate debt as only a portion of the ecological debt, which is in fact only a portion of what they frame as the colonial debt, right? So this should all be kept in mind. People really need to be paying attention to these different things, so because there's a bit of bait of switch operation going on, right? Even within the Green New Deal kind of ideologues that are superficially shifting left. It also made no mention of the U.S. military.

I mean, it's very clear to anybody who has their eyes open and wants a better world for everybody that you have to eliminate the U.S. military if you want just transition for the entire planet. That has to be a central demand. Another central demand has to be the respect for the national state sovereignty, which of countries in the global south. I mean, they should be able to manage their own affairs, right? Now, none of this was in the Green New Deal proposals, but they were still kind of taken as these transformative touchstones.

And this was kind of, in some ways, this was kind of a lure in order to kind of shore up this kind of Eurocentric chauvinism within a lot of the U.S. left, including portions of the climate discourse. I don't want to necessarily say the climate movement, but the climate discourse that in the past, until 2010, we're looking to distinctly other horizons. I mean, Naomi Klein in 2010 was calling the Cochabamba People's Agreement the most transformative accord yet put forward. And in 2019 or 20 is putting out on fire an essay collection fiercely defending Ocasio Hurtas' Green New Deal that is totally silent on climate debt. What happened? Well, this is a longer story. Maybe not the place to get into it. But the point is that anyone who made such a shift is no longer representing an anti-systemic politics.

And people need to pay attention to what's going on because what matters is not Naomi Klein. What matters is changing the world, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to dive in a little bit? I just read a book by Naomi Klein, not the, not the newest one, but the one before it about climate change. Do you want to talk about why you think that that move happened in her, in her thinking? Well, it seems to me that some of her, some of her movies were getting documentaries,

were started to get extensively funded by an array of liberal foundations. I don't want to get them wrong, so I'm not going to name them, but anyone can look into this, that it's been clearly documented that she started to get a lot, of foundation money. I mean, she's started to get profiles in the New Yorker. And this is kind of a pathology that's currently afflicting the left, portions of the U.S. left,

where it's taken as a market success that, you know, our people are in the New Yorker. The New Yorker is a ruling class institution. If your people are in the New Yorker, they are not your people in it. Exactly. Like, and people are like,

oh, the discourse is changing. The discourse is changing. But, you know, you know, last night I'm Googling and there are, you know, rural militants in the Philippines who have been assassinated or surrendering in the face of this kind of brutal, murderous capitalist Duterte regime. What do you mean the discourse is changing? The discourse is changing. And the situation on the ground, you know, people who could be our comrades are getting assassinated. So, you know, I don't quite count this as victories. The discourse is changing. I've been hearing this for 15 years in the Palestine movement.

As Palestine gets smaller and smaller, people say the discourse is changing. It's a ridiculous replacement. It's like a saccharine replacement for the world change. We don't need the discourse to change. We need the world to change. So there's this about Naomi Klein. I mean, also she started writing in the intercept. The intercept, I mean, is, you know,

and this started to be one of her major sources of revenue. And, you know, it's very clear. She shifted her class interest in alignment. And this is totally understandable. But people need to understand this. So they aren't shifted with Naomi Klein. I mean, Naomi Klein can be getting a fat, paycheck from the Intercept, which is funded by Pierre Omdard, who has a distinct, sharply distinct

class interest from a kind of a slum dweller in Alito in Bolivia. And, okay, he is not going, he more or less is going to carry out a media operation that reflects that class interest. It's obvious. This is, like, very common sense. And it's so common sense that you can't discuss it. And if you do, people are like, well, is this some sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory? You're like, no.

I don't think Pierre Ominaar is Jewish and money is not Jewish and so you're like, what? But this is how people talk about these things these days, right? You're like, no, like, no, there's someone who's paying someone else and he's rich and he wants them, obviously, to not do things to totally undermine his interests.

In fact, he wants them to do things that more or less support his interests as he conceives them, which is not communism. And they're like, well, are you saying that Naomi Klein is a member of the Illuminati and you're like you're like no exactly that's not what we're discussing in fact like that you think that is either is a fact of a sharp deterioration in US radical thought and practice or reflects something about your own class interest so but you know people can people honestly can just google this information it's publicly available it's publicly

available is like who's funding I mean and who calls the Piper not always but often decides to turn. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think that's one of the primary sort of co-optive mechanisms is that shift in your own class interest. And often it can happen in such a way that it's not even that you're consciously saying that I'm shifting my politics to reflect my class interest,

but it happens more at a subconscious level and at a level of continual compromises and justifications for your right word shift on policies. And I think that that's interesting. and people should take note of that. Let's go ahead and move on because I really want to talk about this, and obviously this podcast focuses a lot on philosophy, generally, and the history of philosophy.

It's obviously a main topic that we like to address. And I found this chapter in your book really interesting. There's a lot of ways I could take this question, but let me just ask it this way. What is ecomodernism, sort of where does it stem from, and how have some socialists adopted its theoretical framework? Eco-modernism is essentially based around the proposition that there is very little necessary antagonism between capitalism as a historical system and the environment, and that we can essentially remediate most environmental damages within the confines of capitalist property relations through a sufficiently advanced development of tech. technology, right? And often this hinges on these ideas are mythologies really of dematerialization, that is, that there is a way of dematerializing units of GDP. And of course, this is, this is largely mythological. And you can reduce the carbon intensity and decouple carbon dioxide from GDP growth. This can be done, not fast enough, but it can be done. But what cannot be done is to, because when you do that,

it's, you're placing it with renewables and which then have their own material load on the environment. And this is just talking about kind of the basics. I mean, this is a very, that's kind of a reductionist ecological approach. I mean, there's much broader ecological issues involved in merely carbon versus renewable material, you know, the minerals that go into renewable materials, the minerals themselves are, of course, not renewable. So humanism is relying on this kind of mythology. And then it is imported into a lot of what passes for, for the U.S. left. I mean, again, I would use these terms advisedly.

I mean, this is passed into what passes for the U.S. left by Versault Publishing Institution, which is the sovereign property, you know, as five directors, you know, one of which, more or less shrugs at the murder of the Filipino militants I was just talking about. So, okay, like, this is also an operative, this is a pernicious choice on behalf of a number of people that is false to merely assimilate, oh, the U.S. left seems to have this problem. Like, no, actually, people are creating this problem within what passes for the U.S. left, right?

It's not just happening. It's not a law of gravity that this happens, right? This is actually occurring in history through actual actors who are actually engaged in pushing this discourse. Why are they pushing this discourse? Because at the end of the day, right, there's this assumption of technological neutrality, right?

which, technological neutrality, pure and categorical technical neutrality, rather, is then accepts this idea that any technology that the capitalist proposed, we can in fact, we, and who are we, right? Who are our forces, they're we, right? Is this this great organized international first and third world leftists who are well organized to take over technology and actually bend it to the ends of kind of a revolutionary humanitarian, I mean, it's quite farcical when we phrase it that way, right?

This political social force does not actually exist. There remains, God willing to be constituted, right? That's one thing. I mean, so another issue is this idea that you can just take over this technology and use it to socialist ends, right? Now, this is pernicious on multiple levels, right? On the one hand, it omits that this technology is kind of the sword in the hands of a clash struggle that's currently being waged from above, right?

Now, the idea is that you can just take the sword and use it against the hand that's trying to cut you. But in fact, you know, that actually hand has a very firm grip on the sword. And it's kind of like saying, okay, well, you know, instead of thinking how can we defend ourselves against that sword, this kind of, you're like, okay, well, why don't we think about how that this sword that we don't have can be used in a different way?

It's like, well, it doesn't work that way. Like, we don't have the damn sword. Now, you know, concretely, I mean, think about something like geoengineering. I mean, geoengineering is basically being proposed as a way to continue, allow capitalism to continue carbon emissions into the foreseeable future under the idea that the geoengineering, in other words, blocking the rays of the sun in some way, shape, or form can in fact be a way that leftists on our own can take control and protect. human population requirement change. Of course, there's a lot of issues. One, we don't know actually the effects of this technology on the atmosphere. It can't really be modeled. Now, from the perspective of pure social pathology, in other words, capital, and that doesn't matter. They're like, okay, well, you know, we find it more important to continue emitting carbon

and making sure that our fixed investments and all the fossil fuel installations and the reserves we own and so forth, that that can keep burning. The car companies don't have to carry on an abrupt transition. The airplane companies don't have to carry out in abrupt changes, and it's probably not going to be technologically possible, at least in the short to medium term, et cetera, right? So it's understandable why they want to do, but what is the interest of people, not only that,

of people in disorganizing opposition to the use of this technology, right? Because the technology is being used as part and parcel organically of a class struggle from above, which includes allowing continuing carbon emissions, right? which are for, of course, just pro-bursally emit the South, which doesn't really have a vote or in these discussions, right? And the South is actually quite uniformly against these kind of geoengineering solutions, right? I mean, these were very sharply opposed in Koshabamba, you know, with a very, very wide global South consensus, right? And this is stunningly wide global South consensus, opposed these geoengineering technologies.

Now, it seems natural that people in the global North would say, yes, we also oppose these geoengineering technologies. but instead we have this discourse oh well we geoengineer anyway every time we plant a tree right um because that has an effect on uh you know the the the carbon cycle well sure if you use if you have this idealist approach to social thought and social change sure like that this like kind of platonic approach to to understanding words and concepts sure that's happening but this isn't actually that This doesn't clarify anything at all, right? And then on the other hand, people say, oh, you don't think, you don't think technologies can be reappropriated? What about, you know, what about the printing press? What about the Kalashnikov? It's like, okay, yeah, those were reappropriated through massive social struggles.

And they were also, it was thought about how to reappropriate those technologies. This is very different from just saying, oh, yes, well, you know, our forces will be able, we don't have any forces. We don't have any forces. And the states we have definitely are in no capacity to reappropriate those technologies. So this is a fundamental project, whether by intention or whether by being blind to its consequences of disorganizing opposition to the capitalist agenda, including the technologies that it's deploying. So it's something people need to be very aware of and sharply opposed and not be caught by these kind of, you know, second grade verbal tricks that are put forward. know, well, trees are geoengineering to oppose planting trees and, you know, it's, it's quite

ludicrous, the level of discourse, but this is what's put forward. Yeah, incredibly important and absolutely absurd, the way that that stuff is advanced. And it's tricky, and people do fall for it, so it needs to be identified and demystified. And, you know, moving on it, and you've mentioned that Coach Obama's people's process a few times, so let's just go in that direction. And one of the great things about this work that I think is so essential is that it really it tackles and it addresses the sort of history of colonialism and how that shapes the distribution of pain that the climate crisis hands out and how the inequalities of, you know, crafted by colonialism continue to shape the climate crisis that's already here. So with all of that in mind, can you just talk about what the Cochabamba people's process is, the sort of framework it advances for an internationalist response? to climate crisis, and more broadly, just how colonialism is shaping and will continue to shape

this crisis. Right. So the Cuchabanda People's Agreement basically was in part a response from the Bolivian government under Evo Morales, who in terms of the world ecology, absolutely a revolutionary actor and formation. It was a response from, first of all, Evo Marales to the Copenhagen Accords, which sought basically to enshrine climate colonialism, more or less tried to tamp down this idea that common and differentiated responsibility meant that the North had an obligation to the South that

sought to enshrine very slow and kind of voluntary emissions reductions and so forth. And so this was, the actual final agreement was blocked basically by an alliance of radical Latin American states, in addition to Sudan, right? And let us all know, pay attention to what happened to Sudan since 2009, right? Not a coincidence. Now, in response, there was a massive meeting with hundreds, if not thousands of social movements and representative and tens of thousands of attendees that sought to put together people's agreement.

The people's agreement basically said, okay, our world system is sure. structured on the basis of a massive process of colonial genocide and primitive accumulation that was the basis for the primary accumulation of wealth, that is the basis for so-called progress from European capitalism, and that in turn is the basis for the massive kind of techno structure that led to the colonization of the atmosphere, and in turn has led to these massive disparities, not only in per capita and historical per capita. capital CO2 emissions, but has also led to the massive northern responsibility for the desoliation of the environment, the colonization of atmospheric space and waste dumps for CO2,

the capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2. This is incurred a massive debt and that this debt should actually be paid. That should be the primary basis. And this is the idea, in fact, of common and differentiated responsibility is that, okay, people have different responsibilities and those responsibilities can also be, are not just responsibilities in terms, vis-à-vis CO2 reduction or elimination, but these are also responsibilities to one and other, mediated through the interstate system and so calculated on national scales, right? This was the basis, basically, of the Cochabamba People's Agreement, whose, you know, most radical plank is, of course, this call for the payment of climate debt, but there's also a lot of other things. There's calls for comprehensive demilitarization. There's calls for food sovereignty. There's calls for a just development of technology.

There's calls for technologically technology sharing and so forth. I mean, it's a very detailed document. And whenever I do one of these interviews, I say, look, it's less important if you read my book. And it's far more important if you go to Google, Google Cochabamba People's Agreement, print it out, and don't just read the agreement, read the working groups, read the statements of the working groups. This will cost you a couple dollars to print that out or read it online. people read too much online. So read it online and study that.

And this is the ecological communist manifesto for the 21st century. Just go read it. That's what we need. And then figure out how to fight for it from where you are. Right. This is a totally transformative document. I mean, what's even, you know, and the calls for climate debt, you know, they called essentially for 6% of northern GND to flow from the north to the south.

So from the OECD, basically Europe, especially Western Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand to flow, you know, C, circa 2008, 2009, for about 6% of that to flow north-south for an indefinite period of time, right? So this is basically saying that you need, you know, this exceeds northern rates of growth, right? Now, this is neither here nor there in a sense, but it's basically saying, okay, you need to invest these portions of your net social product. These need to be transfers to the South, in fact, because your net social product is based on looting from the South, which you can learn about from meeting like Utsa Patnayev, showing massive transfers from India, where the basis of British wealth, right? So the tune of three, four, five, six percent of the equivalent of British GDP.

per year and that, you know, this by itself is, you know, depending on how one calculates it, $9 to $45 trillion, right? There's disputes about how to calculate it, which are basically, you know, the disputes are irrelevant. We know that it's just a massive amount of money that would totally transform the South. And so the climate debt is based on a very similar principle, in fact, but it's also based on the idea that the North U took these cheap paths to development, namely coal, right, that allows constant energy on a constant basis, which allows us. certain type of development and allows for a certain type of cheap infrastructure to be built up

very quickly, right? And it's the same thing with oil and natural gas. This can't be burnt anymore. In fact, the more, you know, we're already over what can be safely burned. And so that needs to be eliminated and reduced to zero. Okay, then you need a new technology. It's quite expensive to scale it out. The storage is incredibly expensive. And because everyone deserves access to a high level of technology and a high level, relatively high level, at least compared to very poor people, of energy use, then, okay, we need to figure out a way for developmental convergence, worldwide convergence on per capita energy use. So everyone can have access to sufficient energy to have a decent life, right? This is just everyone rational accepts. If you don't accept

this, then you should have to state it openly and then we know not to listen. So this was the basis of the Cochabamba People's Agreement. And so it's obvious that if there's a statement that's calling for 6% of northern GDP to go from the north to the south every year for an unforeseeable time. So someone named a social scientist, Rickard Warlenius, did the calculations. And he, you know, he was showing that it's $1.3 trillion from the U.S., 3.2 trillion a year from the OECD, right? These are huge amounts of money going from the north to the south, along with a historical climate debt, depending on how one calculates it, of between $100 and $400 trillion, right, depending on what

one calculates is the value of carbon. I mean, this was my calculation. Now, this is basically talking about a worldwide social revolution. I'm communists. I advocate a worldwide social revolution and worldwide changes in the structure of property and in our social structures. So it's very telling who is still defending those demands and who became. silent on them and why right so in my opinion if people want to discuss climate on the u.s

on the left you know if they're liberals if they're reaction they have a different agenda but the left should be defending the kochabamba people's agreement and those specific quantities of transfers of wealth that are demands from the south there are not northern demands and these are not demands from uh max aisle right this is how in fact one uh paddle padded reviewer was like this is a that the Max Isle is demanding the climate movements in the North accept his proposals. I'm like, huh? No, these are not my proposals. Right.

Like, you read the footnote. Like, these are proposals from like hundreds and hundreds of millions of people from the global south. The northern climate movement is a couple of 10,000s of people. Who's being sectarian, right? So, you know, again, I urge people to check those documents out. You will learn so much. 100%.

And so well said. It's so essential for the left to internalize. I'll link to the Cochabamba People's Agreement in the show notes of this episode so people can find it as easily as possible. And you're right, that transfer of wealth to the South is absolutely essential in a just and equitable addressing of the climate crisis and sort of reparations for the colonialist history that created, not only the crisis itself, but the unequal distribution of the pain that the crisis creates. But of course, you know, any sort of revolutionary struggle will be met with resistance. And for the liberals, as you point out in your book, there is actually this strategy to basically

restart through green tech and the green industry, another cycle of sort of accumulation while perpetuating this ecologically and geographically unequal exchange. Can you talk about that process and what the sort of liberal capitalist framework of how they see the green tech revolution going is? Sure. So, I mean, they're basically looking at a very, very wide range of technologies to try to sidestep, first of all, distributional issues, but second of all, any fundamental changes in, you know, what passes for the U.S. way of life, by basically thinking that you can find

clean analogs for most of our relevant technology and not merely analogs, but close analogs. So basically that you can swap in either hydrogen or lithium batteries for our current cars and keep our current cars on the roads, that you can find electric or biofuel-fired airplanes and not substantively change our airplane fleet so that you can use the same amount of technology that we are currently using, but it's going to be powered by nuclear so that we do not redesign our buildings so that they cool themselves. through passive heating and cooling and through a variety of other things, pumps, through actually wind towers, as Iranian technology, it's absolutely stunning,

it's beautiful technology, that we don't learn to do these forms of kind of low-tech, decentralized people's technology that I think in many ways aren't quite antithetical to capitalism, certainly have like an elective disaffinity with capitalism and centralized and authoritarian. foreign forms of power. And basically, you can just swap in all of these things, right? And I think the aim is more or less threefold. I mean, one the aim is to say, is a kind of blatant, low-key racist appeal to kind of the core middle classes.

It's like, okay, you do not have to change anything. And you should continue to see your class interest as aligned with the ruling class, right? And so we are going to accomplish that through just swapping in. new technologies to replace your old technologies, and you not need to change your way of life at all, right? This is a part of the appeal, right? And this is also why the appeal comes from most racist segments of what passes for the Western left,

because basically they're offering a red glass on a class alliance with imperialism and capitalism. And this has always been their historic role, right? Going back to Kowdke. Now, that's one thing that is, going on. I mean, the reverse side of that coin, of course, is that this idea of the class alliance itself reflects the decidedly non-social neutral character of technology, right? When someone is like, okay, we can swap biofuels for the existing fuel infrastructure,

okay, well, most biofuels are in competition with food crops in the third world. And this is in a situation where already third world rural people don't have enough control over their own food production, right? They're importing food. There's widespread hunger. I mean, the most common, the preponderance of third world hunger is in the countryside, surprisingly, right? And that is because people don't have access even to enough land to feed themselves, let alone have a surplus in order to carry out a form of accumulation from below, right? So this superficially neutral technology, right, whether whatever form of biofuels is in fact already based on a certain system of property relations that makes it rational to say, oh, we can divert this plot of land to that. Yeah, you can divert it because you can divert it because you are associated with the property structure that is capable of deciding that that land is not going to be used for growing barley.

in Indonesia, or that is not going to be used for, you know, for what have you in southern Brazil, right? And it's going to be used for biofuel crops. Now, the second aspect of this is kind of very utopian salesmanship that people are like, okay, no, we're going to use third, fourth, fifth generation biofuels. There's the possibility of doing that in a way that isn't in competition with food crops. And of course, this just kind of further is a mission of disorientation and confusion and disorganization at the ideological level of people in the core, right? It's saying, oh, well, okay, maybe let's speculate about these technologies that possibly would be on the agenda in 30 or 40 years, or let's devote energy to these technologies as opposed to thinking, okay, what would it look like if we actually issued demands from below for the reimbursed? orientation of technology development right now for a people's technology, right?

What would that even look like, right? So that is, that's kept off the agenda, right? Through this discourse of technological fixes from above, right? So it's a massive process of both this organization but also obscuring the kind of class dynamics of existing patterns of technological development, right? which are decidedly not class neutral, right? And in fact, the entire price structure and including the so-called externalities, right, the fact that pollution concentrates in the south, waste concentrates in the south

through extant extractive and industrial techniques, that this is a consequence of a worldwide price structure that suppresses prices and also suppresses the kind of economic value of lives of people in the south, such that these technologies and the raw material inputs into these technologies can be secure primarily from the south and then can flow to the north, right? And it's like, oh, well, that's just, that's the prices. This is normal. Okay, well, the price is hiding a lot of that.

Right, exactly. Precisely correct, yeah. And, you know, that actually leads well into this next topic. And it's one of the parts of your book that I really found fascinating. and I hadn't really heard really in-depth discussions of this concept, which is that of agroecology. Can you talk about agroecology, sort of how it differs from extractive capitalist agricultural processes and how it can actually help not only sequester carbon, but as you mentioned in your book, even prevent future pandemics like the one we're going through now?

Absolutely. So agroecology emerged in several places in the south, not always under that name, but was basically, first of all, a reaction in the 1970s on the part of a range of agronomists and anthropologists and sociologists, geographers, kind of ethnobotanists, and so forth, to the modernization of third world agriculture, particularly under the Green Revolution, right, which is basically unifying this kind of uniform template or model of input-intensive agriculture that using inputs that only wealthy people could afford that with massive ecological side effects

and kind of induced massive peasant differentiation, flight to the cities and so forth, and of course had catastrophic biospheric or larger effects on the ecology, on third world ecologists. So people went back and were like, okay, but actually peasant farming systems have largely endured in many places, right?

Or smallholder farming systems, they still seem to be using other forms of technology despite the apparent or purported rationality and superiority of these kind of these imposed patterns coming in form the Green Revolution, let us investigate their socio-ecological logic, right? So you had a lot of people investigating that you had, and primarily a lot of them were, like I said, ethnobotanists or anthropologists or people interested in agronomy or biology, right? These were a lot of natural scientists who were going out and seeing, especially in the basis of, field surveys in Mexico. And we're saying, okay, this kind of thing, this Milpa, which is a combination of the three sisters of squash, maize, corn, and black beans, which first of all produces, basically

provides a more or less complete protein bundle, is also very nutritionally complete when you take them on sequence. And also, these appear to be very ecologically reliable. So they restore the soil. These are more or less taken as kind of protect the ecology and more or less in terms of output are more or less stable. And the peasants keep doing it. Why? And then they investigated.

They said, okay, first of all, there are lots of effects when you mix between these various crops. For one thing, because you don't have a monoculture, you have a polyculture, meaning you don't have one crop, you have three crops planted together. This wards off the growth of insects. for example, and all forms of blights, because these blights, right, a lot of, whether that's pests, whether that's crop diseases, they thrive on monocultures, the same way that, you know, if they see that if everything is genetically uniform, as soon as one pest gets in there, then it's going to wipe the whole thing out. But if you have a genetic diversity, and of course you have more generic diversity, if you

have three different crops, then the pests don't get in there and can't wipe everything out. And that's a fortiori when you actually have distinct subspecies. So typical Mexican farmer, right, in Chappas could have 15 or 20 different varieties of maize in their pot, right? They could have many different varieties of corn, each one of which is resistant against a different climactic condition, each of which might be more resistant to certain forms of blights, each of which might be more or less resistant to different forms of insect plagues and so forth. So it's a very durable technology. Why is it needed to have that technology durable?

I mean, it isn't because like it isn't quite because these producers are kind of these kind of genius natural, you know, natural biologists exactly, although in effect that that's partially true. I mean, this is part of it, right? They are doing natural biodiversity and conservation, but this is. This is also, this is reflecting a certain social pattern, right? The social pattern is that if you are a subsistence farmer, you actually need a great deal of stability and resilience in your farming system. Because if that farming system collapses, you are totally screwed, right? So this actually, you know, this reflects totally intelligent adaptation to the social conditions imposed on these types of farmers,

where they have to carry out a certain form of production in order to preserve their well-being and their family's well-being, right? This is the kind of disposition on some of the social logic of agroecology. It turns out that farming this way also mimics nature in many ways, right? This is not a copy of nature, but it's something that looks more like nature than contemporary capitalist industrial agriculture, which actually kind of demimics or distanced itself from nature and is carrying up this kind of override of nature to have cropping systems that look very little like natural, like the natural landscape.

And the natural landscape is not a monoculture. It's a polyculture, right? And it is, it's not quite home. You don't want to say it's homeostatic, right? It's in a constant flux all the time, but it doesn't, it's not vulnerable in the same way that these highly input-intensive systems are. And it also is based on nutrient recycling, right? Nature is based on nutrient recycling. And these forms of farming are also based on nutrient recycling.

So people are through animals or even through human waste, was very common, especially in East Asia, and East Asian agriculture, for a long time, the most productive agriculture on the planet, are based on a complete recycling of nitrogen, closing the nitrogen cycle, right, through human waste recycling and animal waste recycling. So animals are integrally part of these production systems. Basically, at the root level, these are based on trying to produce an agriculture that is closer to mimicking the logic of the types of plots that, nature itself will produce but doing it with human intervention right now this is important because

one agriculture itself should be an energy produced for at an energetic level agriculture should be an energy producing system in a sense right it is i mean the a leaf is basically an organic machine for gathering solar energy and converting it into a form that uh if it's a certain type of leaf consumable by an animal and, you know, other types of crops are, of course, consumable directly by humans without much manipulation and so forth, right? So it's a process of energetic conversion, right? And of course, it's not capturing all the solar energy, but contemporary agriculture is totally reversed that process.

So in the past, you would use sunlight to make peanuts. This is the analogy used by John Vandermere. Now contemporary agriculture, basically in one way or another, because of the amount of energy that's going into producing all the inputs is basically using coal or oil to make peanut butter, right? And it's to the point where you have like three, four, five, ten, fifteen calories of energy going to produce one energy that's usable for humans, whereas some of the peak systems that previously existed, one calorie of human effort, because you didn't have any external calories going in, would produce 30 calories usable by humans.

right, as food. The idea of agroecology is not to go back to the difficulties of traditional agriculture, although I would say the difficulties of traditional agriculture are social, are mostly social and capitalist related to capitalism and hierarchy, or feudalism, rather than intrinsic to the form of production itself. So, for example, to go back to the example of the Milpa, what was found is that one person, you know, doing more or less a year-round labor could actually produce enough food to feed between 10 and 15 people,

which is actually – could be surprising to people. I mean, that's actually not that much of the total human labor, even under those systems, was directly involved in direct agricultural production. That's not a – that's a much higher number than we have in the United States, right? because that's going to be between nine, between seven, six and nine percent of total human labor is involved in direct agricultural production. But that is not like 20 percent or 30 percent, right? So it's actually, from that perspective, from a social labor perspective, it's actually not using that much of the total social labor either. The main problem is people didn't have big enough plots, right?

or they have, or, you know, their children and very often their wives, if they're not directly involved in agriculture, are having to do a lot of other work. And this is what makes life difficult, right? They're poor. They're not getting good money and they're not getting a lot for their crops. There's a feudal overlord who's taking a cut of their crops and so forth, right? Or they're tied into the market system so that they're paying a lot for other means of, you know, other things they need for their social reproduction and this request. them to take another job and so forth. There's a lot of other things going on that are producing their poverty,

but it's not the act of agriculture per se, right? So if we want an agriculture that kind of goes back to the past to go back to the future in a more advanced way, right? We want, where agroecology is this is kind of trying to apply modern scientific experimentation and modern scientific investigation, lab science to better understand and improve upon the principles of traditional farming systems, right? And what we've found is that, in fact, these can be highly productive, right?

These can, in some cases, they can be not that much less productive than Western agricultures. They could be, in terms of production per square foot of crop, they could be maybe for the most productive northern crops, they could be like 25% lower, say, for cereal, for corn, wheat, so far. That's lower. That's not a lot lower, right? And actually, there's a huge overproduction of cereals and a lot of crops in the global north, right?

A lot of it is lost to waste. A lot of it is lost to biofuels. A lot of it is fed to animals in our current system to fatten them up in ways that are ecologically sustainable. So we want to get our agricultural system under control because there's also the primary interface humans have with the rest of the planet, right? Like agriculture is this kind of huge human-made blanket between. humans and the rest of nature between the, you know, the soil that affects how we interact

with the forests, with the paris, and so forth. If we get that under control and kind of subjected to a ecological, holistic ecological outlook and mode of operation, we'll resolve a lot of further environmental problems. If we don't, then, you know, it's possible, you know, we'll be looking at a lot of kind of cascading collapses in natural systems. Yeah. Yeah. This is such an essential point. And I think a lot of people, when they think about climate change and emissions, their mind goes to like cars and like factory smoke stacks. But, you know, agriculture is a huge contributor to climate change, but it can be, and it's going to, need to be radically changed from the sort of, you know, hyper monoculture, extractive form of

capitalism, agriculture to this more holistic ecological approach if we're going to reduce emissions and preserve food in the face of deteriorating crop yields that are going to be an inevitable result of more droughts, more heat waves, etc. So working with nature as opposed to brutally against it is absolutely essential. And this is not something that's going to happen in the future. like I just heard recently farmers in Madagascar just because of the shifting rain patterns brought on by the climate crisis are already completely disoriented and losing their crops and not being able to farm like they have for millennia in that area. So this is a present problem and it's only going to get much, much worse. One thing you do hear from certain segments of the left, if you will, broadly conceived, and you hear it a lot all the time actually is this idea of a very, of very. veganism, this idea that, you know, and you talk about culturally appropriate food and you

push back against some of this in your book and in your work more broadly, but this idea that everybody has to go vegan as a core feature of addressing the climate crisis. And really, if you're not vegan or you're not actively moving in that direction, you are actively creating the problem and not being part of the solution. So I've heard your thoughts on this and other shows, but I would love for you to just sort of give me your thoughts on that whole framework and the idea of veganism needing to become a global thing. Right. So I want to put two things on a table.

One is where I agree with most vegans. I agree with most vegans that the current systems of meat production above all in a global north, but infiltrating into portions of the global south, so the industrialized production of meat, this is a catastrophe, and this should be absolutely remolded and extirpating, right? 100% agreement about that, not only industrialized, but also capitalist, to be very clear. That's one thing. And I agree that the energetic imbalances are overuse of energetic resources that are involved in contemporary, especially American meat consumption, need to be tamped down, right?

To, again, to a permanently sustainable level as with everything else, right? That should be, that's the, that's the horizon is permanent, is orienting towards permanent sustainability. We can't really have it. But that's what we want, right? So we definitely, and we disagree with large private, large, huge, huge state level size private ranches. And I, you know, call for their extirpation. And I call for, you know, and we don't, I don't agree with these massive operations like Tyson, Archer, Daniels, Midland and so forth. Monopoly control.

of meat production. So all of this needs to go. Now, veganism. There's kind of distinct trends in veganism. I mean, one, there is an ethical argument for vegans. I think a lot of this is rather incoherent. It's very strange. I mean, of course, it's not a coincidence. The most famous person arguing for global veganism, Peter Singer, who also thinks we should be euthanizing the disabled trade. Not at all coincidence, right? It's kind of utilitarian logic. It's not really accepted outside of the North American academic community.

So, okay, these ethical arguments for veganism about what one should or shouldn't do, the ethics of killing animals. I want to black at them because that's a separate, that I consider a separate debate that is a few,

has been fused, unfortunately, with an actual debate about the kind of socio-ocology of meat production. Now, the socio-ocology of meat production. The vegans are making, kind of make a series of ludicrous and frequently dishonest claims. I mean, there are these claims that animals are on most of the agricultural land of the United States. Most of this land is not suitable for cereal or other crops usable by humans. And in fact, it has been historically used by some form of herding and grazing animals, right? including, of course, most famously, the bison, but also deer and other animals, right?

And in northern Europe, it's, you know, it's geese that are eating in the ponds and so forth. And so the history of landscapes is the history of certain types of ungulates or, you know, grass and essentially grass eating, of animals occupying a specific niche in the biosphere. They're going to be there. If they're not there, that is the radical intervention. They're not there because of

colonial in the U.S. at least, because of a massive colonial genocide of the bison, right? Which is very well known, right? That's why they're not there. But the baseline is that they're there, and it is normal that this type of landscape, which is actually a huge,

huge portion, I don't know the exact percentage, but a huge portion of the historic landscape of the U.S. has been filled with these animals that can be sustainably hunted or sustainably ranged more than hunted, right? And this kind of sustainable ranging, although the term was not used, was what was done by the indigenous people of this continent for a very long time, right? Now, you know, you don't want to say just because that's what was done before, it's what needs to be done into the future, but you do want to say that in terms of the kind of ecology of it,

veganism has no ecological basis, right? I mean, this idea that most meat production cannot be done sustainably is it's outrageous lie, right? And so they also say, okay, we need to get methane emissions down to zero. And because methane come from all the cow, we're going to get that down to zero. It's like, okay, well, first of all, methane also came from the bison. So why is the baseline? Why are we kind of saying, okay, well, thank God. God, you know, is the argument that, thank God, we, there was a genocide against the indigenous population.

So this gave us more maneuvering room to carry out industrial capitalism with its CO2 emissions. And now we're just going to get rid of that to get to zero methane, you know, and this allows us more maneuvering room to get down to zero carbon dioxide. Is this the actual argument? Or it's never, it's never very clear what the actual argument is, right? because these people aren't actually reading. This is one part of it. I mean, so what if we phrase the question differently? What if we phrase the question is what is a level of meat consumption that is permanently sustainable using the land base of the existing land base of the United States to feed meat to the people living here?

What can be done, how much meat can be consumed, and what would be the effects on the grasslands, essentially, right? In fact, we know that, in fact, the growth of the grasslands has historically relied on bison. The health of the grasslands is very intimately tied to them being actually grazed and pounded by bison and so forth. and the deposit of fecal matter onto the grasslands feeds, the fertility of the grasslands. So this is normal. This is actually how this is part of that ecological cycle. So do you want to extirpate that? What do you want to do, right?

There's this kind of massive geoengineering mentality about a lot of contemporary vegan discourse, especially I want to say contemporary vegan discourse both within liberals and also within a very small but very vocal segment of what has somehow represented itself as leftists, although these people are very often pro-Israel. They defend Israeli lab meat and so forth. I mean, they're not, it's not clear to me that they're leftists at all, right? Or even if they identify as such, they're just platforms by leftists, right? So, you know, that should be the question. And it's also, there are explicit calls. I mean, it's not, you know, another frequent pushback I got when I I talk about this or when I've written about it,

Rob Wallace, and no one's calling for contemporary veganism. I mean, this is a complete lie. You know, Andreas Maum said the most salutory outcome would be global, the global abolition of meat production. That's a call for global veganism, right?

It's very clear. It's not, you know, there's no, there's no niggling around this point. And of course, who are some people who rely overwhelmingly for meat for their consumption in, you know, in his country of birth are the indigenous people, right? The Sami, who, of course, he's never supported in any political endeavor in his life, right? So again, there's this comprehensive and kind of fusing Eurocentric racism about this discourse

as well, in that most of the people who are reliant on subsistence forms or small-scale forms of pure, totally ecological meat production and consumption, right? although I don't know what percentage that is of overall global meat production consumption are people, herders in Africa, indigenous people around the world and so forth. And there are calls to impose compulsory global veganism upon those people. People, and that is a call basically for a radical transformation in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. and what? And should they be concentrated into cities?

You know, should it be what Samuel Huntington called forest draft urbanization in the case of Vietnam? Well, this is more or less the plan, right? Then you can read, you know, other people in this same kind of, you know, this same pantheon of intellectual disorganizers. Mike Davis calling for the city as utopia. The city should be our arc. Okay, well, that's the same policy as the breakthrough institute

and more or less the U.S. government in Vietnam. the city should be the arc. We should concentrate all the population of the countryside into the cities. And then we can pronounce that there's no longer an agrarian question, right? That we don't have a call for agrarian redistribution. And then, of course, other people in this kind of click also say, okay, who are the forces calling for agrarian redistribution? All right, well, these are Stalinists, like people in the Philippines, or these are kind of African despots like Mugabe carrying out the most radical post-World War to agreeing from. You have to understand this type of thought.

is actually a holistic projects, right? This is a class project. It's kind of the capitalist class project passed through a red prism and red-washed and then sold to Western leftists. And it's actually holistic. And it's fundamentally based on ignoring the countryside. And that's kind of its common denominator.

And forms of egalitarian and socially, an ecologically restorative production based on decentralized forms of agrohulture and other forms of land management. I mean, that's the core thing that has to be ignored in all of these discourses. All right. Yeah, I really, really enjoy that argument, and I'm really sympathetic with it, and I think it's important to advance it and to push back against some of this stuff, because I agree if you take the logical conclusion of a lot of these arguments, the results are certainly not anything close to what we would call leftist or liberation-oriented. So I appreciate your work on that front.

Let's go ahead and move toward the end of your book. I have a couple more questions. we're getting up there in time. But I do want to touch on the national question. And in chapter 7 of your book, you address the national question as it relates to the ecological crisis and a people's Green New Deal. And in it, you argue, as you've argued throughout this episode, and more broadly, that decolonization, anti-imperialism, and national self-determination in the global south are absolutely essential components of addressing the ecological crisis broadly. I know it's a whole chapter and you can take this question in whatever direction you want. want. But can you kind of summarize some of your main arguments of that chapter related to

the national question? Right. So I think there's, there's several ways of understanding. I mean, one of them is understanding that the national question is the range of questions dealing with oppressed nationalities, dealing with anti-imperialism, dealing with anti-colonialism, dealing with settler colonialism, dealing with decolonization, and dealing with self-determination, national political leadership, and dealing with state sovereignty, meaning the state national sovereignty within the international system as it actually exists. It's that constellation of political problematics, right? The question is, what is the role of those questions in resolving the current crisis for poor humanity.

And this is, I don't, I don't quite think it's an open question. I mean, I think the answers around a lot of it is relatively clear, even if it's suppressed. I mean, it's one that countries, which doesn't necessarily mean states, but it means that these, because we live in a world system that's structured, that is articulated around legally speaking, an interstate system, that states rights within that state, system need to be respected. And what that means is that they states have a legal right to not be subject to, for example, unilateral coercive actions. In other words, sanctions. States have the right not to be invaded by other countries. And states have the right to not have their,

to not have kind of U.S. intelligence apparatuses or proxies like national. Endowment for Democracy, USAID, operating within their sovereign territory, they have the right to not have proxy armies invading them, even if those proxy armies call themselves revolutionaries. I mean, the U.S. does not have, without the assent of central governments, does not have, you know, and legally it might have the right with the assent of central governments, although it's not conducive to a egalitarian transformation of globalism. those things need to be stopped, right? And you put it that way, and it's obvious, but even people will agree to that,

but they'll be like, okay, oh, but it's not happening. I mean, is the U.S. really active in Syria, after all? It's like, well, yeah, it was reported in the New York Times. The U.S. was very active, arming the Syrian opposition, and that it was funneling, it was on the border with Turkey, with Qatar, and it was overseeing the distribution of weapons. They're like, well, they just didn't really want those weapons to go, and they were making sure they weren't that many.

It's like, no, they were, they kept on announcing that there were billions of dollars going in to fight, you know, to fight the Syrian government. It just, it has to stop doing that. That doesn't mean you support whatever that means, right? These are kind of more ghost words, kind of like conspiracy theories, Soros, Illuminati, right? It doesn't mean you support A or B government. It means that just don't, the U.S. should not be involved. I mean, that's a fundamental aspect in the national question. Another fundamental aspect of the national question is understanding that there continues to be a flow of value from south to the north.

Of course, the same people who basically deny that the U.S. is arming any insurgents in Syria are the same people who deny that there is a flow of value from south to north. In fact, they say that the problem is that the south is not sufficiently exploited by the north, right? That's an argument from Bill Warren, who actually considers imperialism of progressive force. here's a box. It's still in print. So I think these elements are fundamental, right? And climate debt. Climate debt is apportioned, is understood through national level calculations.

I mean, those are the currently existing institutions and mechanisms we have to calculate who owes climate debt to whom and how much and what institutions are available to receive climate debt repayments. Now, personally, if you ask me about who is pushing a transformative agenda in Venezuela, this is the communes. This is not the government. So that's my own political position. But this has absolutely nothing to do with this broader question about what are the real institutions that exist in the real world, not a world we hope to see, that in so far as we are currently advocating in a concrete way, in our concrete world for climate debt. payments. That is going to work its way through the international state system with all of its many contradictions and blacks. I mean, that is a fact of life until that system

changes in a more transformative way, right? That's another thing. You know, a third thing is the national question means that there are distinct burdens towards systemic social transformation, right? People in the South need to democratize their national societies and carry out internal redistributions of wealth and carry out of carrying reforms and so forth more power to them uh people in the north need to prevent the north from going into the south because it's only going to go in to make things worse there we know it that's just uh that's axiomatic and uh in current and current patterns of action and our past history right we don't have the same tasks because we're inserted differently into the international system, right?

This is obscure when people talk very loosely and diffusely about internationalism, support for struggle from below, and claim it's Eurocentric or American-centric to focus on the arena of political action in front of us, which is the U.S. and European governments. Those are the governments whose policies we can shift. That's where we need to act to change, which also means not actively demonizing the same people,

The government is demonizing because that actually creates consent for the U.S. and European action. So that needs to stop, right? It's actually very clear and straightforward when you explain it to people, I think. And I think most people are on board with it. So you have to kind of, you have to demonize it if one doesn't want it to be a widespread discourse, right? So again, this kind of discourse I'm putting forward, it's called, you know, there's, you know, there's this kind of bestiary of names that gets applied to this type of discourse people are saying oh that's Stalinist that's Melmalis this is campest this is douganist this is a conspiracist

this is luminatiist this is hoshai you know this is this is Dengas this is Jias whatever right and it's like no it's not any of those things is actually the most basic kind of common sense that you don't need a fancy theoretical vocabulary to explain to people exactly right so this is what you know this is what i want that job people to to get from that from that chapter is that we can't resolve the climate crisis unless countries are able to reconstitute their own the texture of their own internal socioacologies on their own terms and without the u.s going in and fucking it up and making things first because this is what it does this is what the u.s does 100%. Yeah it's an incredibly important chapter and an important part of this argument and the left

would be so much better off if it actually took these lessons and internalized them seriously. And that relates to a point you made earlier about the dismantling of the U.S. military being a prerequisite to really dealing with the climate crisis and adjust an equitable way. I mean, we spend roughly a trillion dollars a year on just the budget for the military, not to say that the trillions of dollar extra on maintaining bases and doing invasions and all of the things that the U.S. military does. and, you know, that amount of money is really close to the amount of money being asked by something, like a formation like the Cochabamba People's Agreement for transfers to the global South.

And the U.S. military, in addition to all of that is one of the largest institutional polluters on the planet, you know, doing more carbon emissions than 140 other countries to say nothing of what the U.S. as a country does. So on every level, from the anti-imperialist to the decolonial struggles, to the transfer of wealth from the global north to the south, you come to the same conclusion, which is the U.S. military apparatus and the broader European sort of ally ship to that apparatus needs to be utterly confronted and dismantled. And our job is not to critique other countries and their movements and what they should do. Our job as leftists and revolutionaries in the imperial core is to confront and insofar as we can dismantle the apparatuses that are a boot on the neck of people

in the global cell. absolutely i mean and it's you know i'm not averse to understanding it i'm not averse to people understanding the contradictions faced by the bolivarian process itself or for that matter to understand what's going on in uh in zimbabwe right it's fine and it's good to understand it you can investigate it too if you want but uh there's a political task and those are not necessarily the same things all right absolutely all right so i'm going to ask this this final question and then we'll wrap it up and i'm really just interested in in your take on this and then maybe this is a good way to summarize this conversation more broadly.

But ultimately, are you optimistic about our chances on these fronts? And in addition, maybe a final point, what core lessons do you really hope that revolutionaries take from this essential work of yours? I'm mostly optimistic. I mean, I'm optimistic because I think that capitalism has lost all legitimacy, that there is a unstoppable shift to a multipolar world that won't allow the U.S. to just level all anti-systemic struggles. And, you know, I'm optimistic in that I think tens of millions of people

in the U.S. don't accept the way things are currently structured. And I'm optimistic because it's important to be optimistic. I think it's very helpful to be. very pessimistic, right? You know, I don't think we should be diluted about the current state of things, and we definitely shouldn't lie about how things are, but we should be optimistic that things can change, right, for the better. You know, in terms of the necessary lessons, like, you know, get involved, get active,

read the Costa Bamba People's Agreement, support climate debt repayments, consider agriculture important and check your sources. Well said. Well said. The book is a People's Green New Deal. Max, it is a wonderful book and a central book. Thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about it. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online. Just go to my Twitter, Max Isle, and you can also find links to my essays or through like research gate and so forth. forth my website is is inactive for the last year it's broken in fact so stick to twitter perfect i'll

link to that in the show notes so people can find you as easily and quickly as possible thank you so much for coming on keep up the amazing work and let's do it again sometime all right thanks so much i see dead buffalo on the plains of the horizon electromagnetic energy fields like imbison through the air flying like black crows in a circle before the people of the land start dying the anxious siren even the rivers won't act right the full moon was a flashlight in my past light when traveling the winding path that night unravelling the blindings blasting sight chickens come home to roostifying dead buzzards laying next to the head of cousins sisters and brothers fathers and mothers daughters and sons only the vultures

profit I can still see the blood run the slaughter of loved ones hated for being different elders were slain strangled with their talisman killed the body the spirit started drifting physically but the souls were ever living thank you for taking my land and food thank you for killing my seed giving me disease then blaming me thank you thank you for taking my land food thank you for raping my women putting me in the news thank you for killing my seed giving me disease and then blaming me thank you i took my shahada engaged in the drama guard against the devil Chowlin versus Lama We fought felons

Clash with Magellan Baby heads were crushed and bust Like small melons With Chinese demons We'd be baptized to banish In my dream I woke up in Jamaica Speaking Spanish The night the earth cried

When the good ship arrived Blood on the shores Transform to Crimson Tide I built with crazy horse Made a black suns spat The smoke shaft was beat on by Drum backstack The Beatles were baffled

By the state of bondage Showing love like Pocahontious saving John Smith Convinced by the truth of the past since the body's splash. Use the Atlantic as a skeleton raft. I went to a cave to meditate and talk to my celestial mind and elevate.

Thank you for taking my land and food. Thank you. For raping my women putting me in the news. Thank you for killing my seed, giving me disease, then blaming me. Thank you, thank you for taking my land and food. Thank you. For raping my women, putting me in the news.

Thank you for killing my seed, giving me disease. and then claiming me Thank you The land was raped It's gone torn in with it Later on you would praise Mortgage of these killers Even make holidays

For this unholy act I'm the voice of it dead You can't hold me back That buffalo Similar to us now In the name of gain On these planes we get bust down What up how

You think it'd be reparations We've been touched down So make preparations Underwater holding breath I dodge piranha fish With fright Wishing to die was tomorrow's wish I heard the mountain weeks go smash against Cliff was thick

We clashed with the madman from the good ship We did nothing But show love to a stranger We were repaid with murder, rape and anger The buffaloes died The lions would hide The biz cries savagely speaking the pain of the tribe This reality was actually the worst dream

The death of nature I heard the earth scream That buffaloes Empty rivers and streams That buffaloes Too many killers and thieves Thank you for taking my land Thank you.

My women putting me in the news. Thank you for killing my seed, giving me disease, then blaming me. Thank you, thank you for taking my land and food. Thank you. For my women putting me in the news. Thank you for killing my seed, giving me disease, and then blaming me. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be.