Rev Left Radio - For Land: The Capitalist Mode of Production and the Sixth Mass Extinction Event

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

James from Prolekult joins Breht to discuss Prolekult's expansive new documentary, which you can find for free on YouTube, called "For Land: Capitalism as Extinction". Together, they discuss the documentary, political education, how the internal logic of capitalism produces environmental destruction, how the commodity form of labor is at the root of the eco-crisis, eco-marxism, the hyper-destructive role played by colonialism and imperialism, what the revolutionary socialist left needs to grapple with in regards to the crises of our time, and much more! Check out For Land Pt. 1: Capitalism as Extinction Support Prolekult and help them make parts 2 and 3 HERE     Follow Prolekult on Twitter and Instagram Outro Song: "Steady" by CYNE ------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left HERE Follow RLR on IG HERE  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show James from Prolacult to talk about their newest documentary that him and Lexia put out called For Land, Part 1. It's hopefully one in a three-part series of the connections between the capitalist social relations and the commodity form of labor with the ongoing ecological global crisis that we're living in, of which climate change is merely one aspect. This is a really important documentary and I think a really important educational process for those of us interested in socialism, in anti-capitalist critique, in Marxism, really centering and anchoring our analysis of the ongoing environmental crisis, not in, you know, the canards of overpopulation or the natural result of development or actually,

it's all humans who have caused this chaos going back thousands of years, but specifically in the social relations of capitalism itself. And so this is a really interesting educational discussion, and I highly encourage people to go watch the documentary, which will be linked in the show notes, support them on Patreon so they can make parts two and three and really help this really important Marxist educational outlet continue to do. It's crucial and really deep diving work on. so many things. Their channel is full of

really, really thoughtful, in-depth, useful content. So go check it out, support them in any way that you can, etc. Including, and especially their Patreon, which is the only way that they'll be able to really make part two and part three as we discuss at the end of

this discussion. And if you like what we do here, you can join us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. We are and always will be 100% listener funded. Turns out that there's no advertisers for a hardcore communist podcast, nor would we ever accept one because we would never shill stupid shit on this podcast and, you know, just never going to happen. And so the only way

that we can continue doing what we do, continue feeding our families and continue this work is for us to get the support that we get on Patreon. So thank you to everybody who supports us there. And in exchange, of course, you get bonus material. There's over 300 backlogged Patreon exclusive episodes over eight years of us doing, you know, almost eight years of us doing RevLeft Radio. And so there's a lot there for anybody to sign up and immediately be able to dive into. So yeah, check it out if you're so inclined. All right, without further ado, here is my discussion with James of Prolocult on their newest documentary for Land. Enjoy.

Hello, I'm James from Procote Films. We make Marxist films on a variety of educational subjects, and we've recently made one on the climate and extinction crises, which is what I'm here to talk to you all about today. Absolutely. It's wonderful to have you back on the show. I'm a big fan of everything that Prolacult does, and I'm definitely a fan of the new documentary for Land, which we'll be talking about in today's episode.

of course, just as a way to orient people up front, this is a free documentary on YouTube right now. I'll link to it in the show notes. People can and should go watch it, share it. I think it would be a great idea for use in an organizational context for political education or even a local showing for those interested. There's lots of things that people could do creatively with this documentary. It's really, really well done and really strikes at the root, as we'll see throughout this conversation of the broadly consistent.

environmental crisis, which is much more than just climate change, but is the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history and an all-out assault on the biosphere. So with all of that kind of on the table, I know you've been on the show before, but certainly there are probably new listeners or listeners that might have missed that. So can you just remind us what Prolacolt is, what its approach to education is, and kind of why you started it? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for the kind words on the film and the project and I'm happy to be back here again. It's lovely to speak to you again.

In terms of what we are, protocol is sort of an environment in Marxist filmmaking and online education. We have a YouTube channel and we also do a lot more behind the scenes. So we try to create materials that basically are useful in both online and offline settings

and provoke more questions than they kind of necessarily answer in order to generate discussion and to do that in kind of multiple different political educational circumstances we also run our own educational infrastructure have regular reading groups and so on and so forth in that way and we try to have quite a holistic approach in respect of that so alongside the videos you can also like reading lists and that kind of stuff from our other in terms of why we kind of see the platform I guess is fulfilling hopefully a useful role in promoting kind of

The discussions that you wouldn't necessarily come across in day-to-day organizational reproduction or day-to-day kind of politics of a tendency, but which can be quite crucial for Marxism as a whole. And we try to highlight these useful and hopefully provocative ways, which go across different tendencies. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about. You know, your channel and your entire project is it's non-dogmatic, it's non-sectarian, it's principled Marxism. It's curious. It's open-minded. It's critical. It's deep. deeply informed. It's artistic. And it has all of these wonderful qualities without some of the negative qualities that can sometimes, you know, sometimes occur on the left in general or

in politics in general, the dogmatism, the sectarianism, the close-mindedness, etc. Things that, you know, I dislike in myself and in others. And I like to see that non-dogmatism reflected in other educational outlets, which is really, really cool. And you all do it really well. You strike that balance between open-minded Marxism and like really principled, you know, Marxism at the same time. So I think that's one of the great benefits. And I highly encourage people to go check out and support everything you all do. But let's go ahead and just get into the topic of today's discussion, which is this new documentary from your outlet entitled For Land, which is again up for free on YouTube as we speak. Can you kind of talk about this specific project, why you

decided to focus on the topic of land, climate, nature, and the biosphere? Yeah, absolutely. So there's kind of a conscious process and a less conscious process in terms of how we wound up here. The less conscious process was we were doing some videos in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, where we felt the need to stake out kind of an emphasis on deeper internationalist positions through the prism of the old Bolshevik slow. and peace land and bread.

And so we got peace done, we got bread done okay, I think, highlighted some things there in terms of war. It's quite a visceral example in terms of why internationalism would be needed. It's quite straightforward, I think, in terms of why we need an internationalist, proletarian in politics in that respect. Food, once you go through the fact that, you know, food distribution is a global problem and soil declusion is a global problem, again, stands out. But then when you get to the land question, it becomes really, really difficult

because in order to get up the kind of broader problems, you end up doing, I started doing research on climate and then that led into biodiversity, which then ended up with me kind of having to read through a huge volume of kind of different ecological texts, industrial texts, history, and then eco-socialist literature. And it just kind of generated this massive project that we ended up kind of taking on. The first part of that is out now for land part one. and that looks as capitalism as an extinction event, which is on the one hand quite a broad subject, I'm sure we can get into it later, but that kind of sets the baseline for what we want to do, which is a kind of much broader critique of capitalism as a whole. And when the project kind of grew that way naturally out as the research,

we did have a bit of a political step back and really think it through politically more, which means that there is a conscious element to take on a project this big. and we ended up where we are partially because we think the full argument is they really worth hearing and partially because we think we have some quite important interventions in relation to different kind of technical emphases and reliance on Marxology within kind of general ecological thought and eco-surgical thought particularly and we thought we could really offer some interventions in that respect

so it kind of came out of what we were doing but then we thought about it a bit more and thought it was something that we really, really wanted to see it as well. Yeah, and we'll get to eco-Marxism in a bit, but certainly this environmental strain on the revolutionary left is becoming more and more important. I mean, we're recording now a few days to a week after the destruction rot in the American South by Hurricane Helene, massive destruction, massive flooding, you know, huge giant supermarkets, throwing out food in the back while police prevent. desperate people from entering to get food in the front, very little, really honestly, national. There's some national coverage for sure, but it's not as highlighted as it should be. And the slow help from the federal government while it continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Israel and Ukraine and all these wars, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide as just another really stark inflection point that we've seen many times before. I mean, it harkens back as an American, it harkens back to the early 2000s when we're simultaneously, you know, waging these wars in West Asia while, you know, Hurricane Katrina hits and the desperate people of New Orleans are really left to fend for themselves.

Many died were the victims of various ailments, violence, desperation, poverty, etc. So we're speaking at a time in which the issues that you cover in part in foreign land, part one, are really being highlighted all around us. And then we look over and we'll get to colonialism in a bit as well, but we look over into West Asia and the Levant and we see, you know, Israel reeking, you know, eco-I mean, on top of the humanitarian destruction and crimes against humanity being wrought over there, the environmental and ecological destruction of the entire area is just continuing to expand. The U.S. military, of course, which is backing it up, is the number one non-state contributor to climate change. So these things are deeply, deeply intertwined, and you certainly make a point of that. And I really do appreciate, and I think it's useful to have this heuristic paradigm of capitalism as an extinction event. I think that's really crucial. Do you have anything to say about any of that before we move on to the next question?

Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of kind of the urgency of ecological devastation and its increasing frequency, I think that's something that we've seen viscerally, repeatedly year in a year, year out of that sharpening and that process getting worse than some of the more kind of horrific things like the hurricane season you're describing but then also come of playing out in different natural indicators and we saw that with I think last year Antarctic sea ice went to decline in its winter months which is an event we've not seen in millions of years we saw mass deoxygenation events in the seas we saw a mass mass cattle die off in

in the US, but then also in Europe and then around the globe as well, particularly in the one of Africa. We've seen that under that sort of three or four years. And all of these things are really becoming quite profound and tie back into that process, not only through kind of the raw kind of pollution and destruction of war, but then also through various different processes that are kind of attached to that with the kind of increasing fragmentation of like resource bases and the depletion of things like water. adding new dimensions to those wars and new ways of them sparking out and things like that

alongside the kind of law impact of it. And so that urgency is something that's really important to kind of hit on and understand because it's something that I think we see a lot in the discussion around this. Like we often hear like we are in a climate crisis and then we are in an extinction event. We don't necessarily think of that because it's not something that's reflected visually in front of us and viscerally in front of us day and day out. but when we kind of get into it, two things happen, I think, and on the one hand, I think getting through that urgency

can be really kind of depressing, duma-ish kind of process initially. But once you kind of get a handle on it, you realize that it is a catastrophe, but it's not like a quick catastrophe. It's a sequence of catastrophes that are playing out in increasingly erratic and dangerous ways, but that's still something that's not going to, the world's not going to end in a matter of weeks. And so these things are kind of, it can be a bit of, bit kind of a once you get to that conclusion it could be a bit of a bulwark against feeling

the kind of depressing elements and understanding it as a process and then also just understanding that that kind of scale also really again highlights that internationalist need that I was trying to get at in the kind of initial throws of the project yeah absolutely I'm correct on the internationalist aspects of of this and the the solidarity needed to combat these these forces a thing that comes to mind as you as you're talking is the the concept I think think advanced by a philosopher named Tim Morton, who talks about this concept of a hyper-object, which is an object or event whose dimensions in space and time are massive in relation to a human life such that they're hard for us to sort of conceptualize and grapple with.

And I think climate change, and I mean, I use climate change, but much more broadly, the assault on the biosphere, environmental collapse, the six mass extinction. This is a sort of hyper-object that, yeah, you're right. If you can just live in your own specific corner of the globe, maybe you do have, you know, a particularly bad drought or a particularly bad flood one year, but it's with a with a corporate media that doesn't really talk about it. And, you know, a lot of ways in which you can distract yourself from the reality, a lot of a lot of human beings are sort of not fully wrestling with the dimensions of this problem. And I think a documentary like yours is a really needed corrective

to that because it is very visual. It's very very. visceral. It's very dialectical and that it shows the interrelations of processes that are crucial to understanding of the entire, you know, the entire issue at a much, much deeper level. And it sort of has this element of not blackpilling, but of, you know, hopefully inspiring people to take action. Because as you said, this is not going to be over in a week. It's not written in stone that this is going to continue out. We can struggle and we can fight for a better world. And we can the Earth can and we can heal ourselves and our planet but the system that we live under right now is going to make that impossible and so the system itself has to be confronted before we move

on though one of the aspects of your of your film is talking about the Amazon and I'm just curious I know I didn't put this in the outline but I'm just curious if you could touch on or remind people of the current state of the Amazon which is obviously one of those one of many but a particularly crucial, you know, ecosystem for the planet of the health and a good indicator of the planet's overall health. Yeah. So I'll begin by kind of setting out maybe some of the scope of the Amazon crisis. I think that everyone knows that the Amazon's big, but until you have it put in, like, real terms, it's something that maybe people don't realize how big and how significant it is. And so we're talking about a region, the full Amazon region, is as

larger as the contiguous the United States. It's enormous. And then we're also talking about a place which has roughly 20% of the Earth's fresh water running through it, something which it really kind of impacts as well. As a rainforest, it really impacts like natural water cycles and things like that. And then it's also 40% of the world's remaining rainforest, which is a sizable chunk. and also finally accounts for 25% of terrestrial biodiversity. So that's a quarter of land animals live within the Amazon as well, which is an extremely obviously significant number of different strands to play into one environment.

At present, so around 2020-ish, there's a lot of different studies on this. They'll point to around this point in time, but it can be a little earlier, can't be a little later, It can be a little later, but around 2020, the Amazon passed a tipping point in terms of its aggregate natural functions. So previously, the number of, the amount of plant life and trees, particularly within the Amazon, played a crucial role as a carbon sink globally. And now the Amazon is a net emitter of greenhouse gas and is principally methane. And that is largely thrown up from agricultural production, but then also from deforestation, from kind of deep forestation, from kind of deep. mining as well, another one we really kind of draw out a lot of the environmental implications from in the selt, and oil extraction, urbanisation, and so on and so forth.

So there's a huge number of processes implicated, but all of them tie toward this kind of aggregate tipping point. That's a really dangerous situation. It has, in terms of rain patterns, even regionably, it has huge consequences. In terms of subsistence for whole regions, That's a huge problem in terms of how, because alongside that kind of aggregate change, you see things like desertification, starting to eat into the edges of the rainforest, turning it into savannah. You see the kind of destruction of really quite thin soils, and Amazonian soils are very thin. They tend to subsist primarily on the natural cycle of growth and then dying back of plant life.

So when that process is stopped, as it is through kind of mass deforestation, and particularly very large steel agriculture, that leads to massive desiccation for the soil and further erosion of the forest as a whole. And so with kind of all of those things in mind, we are looking at a position where the Amazon, as the ecosystem we have known it, is already passed and as an ecosystem at all, is on a very tenuous threshold with some estimates suggesting around 25% of rainforest could be lost, would equate the doom of, would basically mean the death of the Amazon through is identification, and that is presently around 17 to

20 percent, I think probably on the 20s and keep one of those estimates are from. Yeah, horrifying, horrifying stuff to contemplate. So with those things in mind and certainly having taken stock of the overall situation, or at least parts of the situation, which we could talk hours and hours,

just going through the horrors of what's going on in the world and the environment, with all of that in mind, what would you say is the central thesis of four land part one? So I sort of briefly mentioned it before, but the central thesis in the first part is that capital is an extinction event

as a social relation. And that is not something I'm arguing in just times of terms of environmental destruction, but in kind of raw sense, but something I've tried to gear toward the scientific and historical explanation we have as a species of what an event, a mass extinction on this scale actually is.

And so there are four criteria for determining if a mass extinction is happening and what it consists of. One's a simple metric in terms of, like, is this period now something we could judge as a mass extinction? And that is the real present rate of extinction and the deep time background rate of extinction.

So that's how many extinctions species are going extinct now in this period. versus the deep time background rate, which is how many species is it normal to go extinct within a similarly stainful climactic period of Earth's history? And those are really complicated figures

that are really difficult to get a whole of, but in general scientists, the science kind of agrees the present real extinction rate, the number of species actually going extinct, exceeds the background rate by the normal amount, deep time historical background rate, exceeds that figure died between 100 to 1,000 to 1,000,

or 10,000 to 100,000 times. So massive range in estimates that in general were at least 100 times over the background rate, which is not good. The second criteria for a mass extinction on this scale is that if we're saying that this is commonly referred to as the sixth mass extinction or a mass extinction on that scale, which means we're referring to a group of it, we're comparing this event to a group of extinctions known as the big five mass extinctions. all of which saw the kind of destruction and extinction of 75% of life on Earth. And so that's the comparison people are drawing when they say that we are living through the six-nice extinction. They're saying that the real rates of species extinction are now so bad to exceed the background rate to such degree that we could. We're witnessing a event, which will see around 75% of life on Earth die unless it's stopped.

then there's kind of two different criteria here and these are really important for understanding the argument that I kind of put across in the film the first is the time period of an extinction event and the shortest we know of is 5,000 years so this in terms of the big five so this is the criterion that's really important for understanding extinction studies

and how it comes to understand things as extinctions and so this is a problem for Marxist arguments when we think that dating modes of production is probably as difficult as dating geological periods, which is a thing that Marx actually says somewhere. But we can say capitalism as an industrial form of society which has structured our natural environment and the mode of living to such a degree to create these changes. We can date that within around a thousand years, give or take of it. And that is not as long as long as 5,000 years and not as long as a discipline which deals in things of normally in 12,000, 25,000 year periods.

It's not a long enough period for that discipline to often consider, which is one reason why I think of the social argument gets pushed aside by that field. And then the final category is a mass extinction must link terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. So it must provide a bridge which unites these kind of very different ecosystems. systems, those in the ocean, and those are land, and it must unite them in a common process. Most often, in mass extinction science, this is going to be through the kind of category of the atmosphere and through climactic change. It doesn't need to be there. It simply needs to unite terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems in the same process. And so whilst the timescale argument isn't sufficient in terms of a lot of the kind of stuff, for us,

it problems for us in terms of capitalism's time scale being quite small relative to the kind of criteria for normal mass extinction within the scientific field. And that would seem to be a mark against that argument. I think that's not really an essential element and that it's entirely plausible that a mass extinction that socially created could be shorter than one created by volcanoes and so on and so forth. And the argument that all humanity is responsible, which is the counterpoint to the argument, the capitalism is responsible, has a far worse weakness, which is that its causal argument is really a mess. So there's a lot I could go into in terms of the history around this, but most kind of arguments that humans are responsible for climate

change and the six mass extinction in general sense, which is the dominant argument in most forms of extinction science and climate science and general, well, I guess, professionalised, hard sciences. And that's the dominant argument. The more extreme versions of that argument will say that the six mass extinction started between 45 to 25,000 years ago with the megafaunal extinctions. Are you familiar with the concept of like a keystone species? Yeah, like a species in an ecosystem that if it is gone, then it has deleterious impacts on all the other species?

Yes, yeah. And so that argument's applied to megafauna in this case. And so megafauna, we're talking like giant swaths, giant horses, that is woolly mammoths, that kind of stuff. And they were argued, in this argument, kind of treated as a keystone species for the pre-human landscape, I guess, pre-agrarian landscape that emerges around 12,000 years ago, so about 10,000 years after this. And so those kind of, there was a lot of, there was so many megafauna

in this period that some estimates suggest that around 80% of woody vegetation on the earth was trampled down by them. So we're talking about, like, they are everywhere. And the dominant theory, which people who are arguing that this constitutes part of the extinction event that we're living through now have, is that humans killed them, hunted them to death en masse, for very little economic reason. I don't think that holds up in a social sense,

because on the one hand, the kind of megafaunal stuff, if they're suppressing that much woody vegetation, then they're kind of, creating conditions for a carbon problem of their own by stopping carbon sinks. But then also the destruction of these kind of species also kind of, if it was hunting, it wouldn't have been for food. And we're talking about like mass migrating animals, which could have gone into stampede modes if they were prompted on a mass migration, for example, explaining some of the kind of fossil record. Going outside of those explanations, though, this event only affects

one sphere, one kind of strata of life, albeit with broader consequences. For instance for the ecosystems, after these animals died, forests proliferated, and human kind of settlement in forest became a massive possibility in that period. And so the ecosystem certainly, it changed, but it didn't die off in a kind of mass extinction sentence. And thirdly, this didn't unite oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems because the oceans weren't even touched, right? A kind of slightly more credible version of the argument that humans cause all extinctions can be seen in the argument that this is something that develops following the Neolithic revolutions, the invention of agriculture, between 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.

And that's something that happens independently in Europe and Asia and the Americas. We don't kind of know very much about it, obviously, but it happened to depend on something we think now. and those that basically those kind of those conditions did create agrarians pre-capital

societies did create ecocidal conditions very often not inherently there were a lot that didn't as well which is one mark against this argument but none of those ecological collapses however profound they were for the individual societies were global right they may have had

longer lasting consequences which formed some of the kind of elements which lead to the formation of this six-mass extinction, but ocean and terrestrial ecosystems are not united in a singular process of destruction by anything, not even something like Rome, okay? Capitalism is the only social system that has ever achieved that, which is the fundamental reason why I think it's the only thing that can be said to meet the criteria of an extinction event, the only thing that unites oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems on a global scale

is the only social system to ever have done that. And that's why I think we have to kind of bite the bullet on the timescale argument and say, okay, but capitalism is the only social force in history which has achieved this thing. It's the only thing that fits this scientific criteria as a functional argument. Yeah, I mean, I completely, I find your argument, I mean, fully convincing and I'm completely on board, which is probably no surprise based on our shared sort of ideological understanding. But yeah, just the way that you go through, you know, that idea that human, in general going back thousands of years have created this event and that capitalism is not a

particularly special or unique phase in this overall process, I think is really important. And even in the case of overhunting megafauna, they're still, you know, to use a certain term and philosophy, still very much in a state of nature. They haven't broken its bounds and had a global multi-layered assault like you have post-industrial revolution and post-industrial the rise of capitalism, you know, so there are instances in which, you know, a species gets introduced to a new environment and that species can wreak havoc and then over time the ecosystems balance out. And it is like large timescale such that those adaptations can take place, but the sort of full frontal assault in the past 250 years, but especially

in the last 100 years or so, it's just unprecedented in historical time. So to just quickly refresh people's memory on your criteria. for mass extinction events is one present rate of species extinction in comparison to the deep time rate background rate two comparing the current species extinction to the big five where 75% of species in each of those instances were loss three the time period which you just went over in detail and pushed back on a certain argument that humans cause it and then the the necessary link between terrestrial and ocean ecosystems in a common process, which we see, obviously right now, they're both in the current common process of

destabilization climatically, species-wise, et cetera. Another argument you'll hear very often in present-day situations and outside of the scientific realm, which has a lot of purchase just amongst people's commonsensical notions. And in fact, I hear this argument, I just recently heard it like a week ago or two weeks ago made by that terrible person, Bill Maher. But the phrase goes, or the argument goes that, you know, climate change is just either a natural outcome of human development. And if we want modern human society, there's going to have to be this collateral damage. Or the other argument, it's tied to it, is the overpopulation argument, right? That there's just so many people that the amount of people

in and of itself is unsustainable and is causing, you know, this environmental collapse. So how would, briefly, maybe, how would you deal with such arguments? I mean, there's a lot of different ways to deal with those kind of arguments. The first one, the argument that we just kind of have, it's a natural outgrowth of just human activity. We have to kind of take the punch is kind of, like the critique there is quite straight forward, is that that's wantonly reckless behavior on, like, no logical foundation other than it's the path of least inconvenience. And so in that argument, you're kind of willing to stare kind of not only just basic facts, but then like the consequences of those things, like the fact that the Horn of Africa has been in famine for about five years, as now continuously, as part of a broader global situation where it drives towards. famine are increasing everywhere. There's a practical argument you can make to those people as well

that like, okay, but soil depletion is real. This is a really obvious one, but soil depletion is real. Industrial fertilizers are both kind of dwindling in terms of capacity due to the lower energy received on energy invested that we're increasingly seeing as a phenomena. And prices are becoming unsustainable for particularly small-scale farming, which leaves only monopoly harmful farming, which is, at the very least, anyone would have to grant it bad for our health. So in faced with that kind of conditions, how could you justify being so want than be socially reckless when it impacts something as straightforward as like the well-being of kind of the farming classes who, people who have these kind of traditional arguments, these kind of arguments

tend to have a view of themselves as having those kind of traditional communities behind the common sense that they're articulating, despite the fact that it goes directly against it. arguments are kind of, there's a denialism wrapped up in it, but I think focusing on the fact of it is kind of a way to miss the argument and what needs to be more kind of convincing with that kind of argument is like, well, you want this to happen then. You know, you want this strata of society to suffer. How do you answer that kind of claim and tie it? So I always try to tie it to a strata of society that person thinks they represent as well. And then the second argument around kind of population growth is, I mean, Neo-Malthusianism is a mixed bag in terms of what people actually kind of articulating there. So one of the necessary consequences of that longer kind of all humans do the argument, the idea that megafauna extinctions and the invention of agriculture are implicated in the same process as we're seeing now. that kind of argument really does rely on this kind of linearly going up number of humans

and increasing technology to sustain that kind of base which is a really really simplistic non-historical way of looking at the world first of all it's not particularly like true in any instance but then it also gets you into positions where you're assuming something quite bad about humans and people and quite fundamentally destructive about us, which doesn't hold up against the mass of history. And then you can kind of redirect people to ways this has

made us misunderstand the turn to steam, for example. The Malthusian argument for the term to steam is that there was something called an energy bottleneck, which means that there was a dearth of energy relative to other resources at the time of the transition to steam. Andres Malm, who the film refers to quite a bit, has shown quite definitively that that's not the case, that there was an abundance of water power and it was just as productive as seen in that period. It was simply less controllable

and less deployable against working class people in terms of geographical space, it's on. And so it wasn't that there was too many people using all the resources and we had an energy problem. That just wasn't true. And so if you argue that, you're missing key facts about the way reality is shape. And then there's the final kind of argument about kind of raw consumption levels, and it's clearly not of the population when we have such a dramatic redistribution of high levels of consumption, not only to high-income societies, but particular extremely wealthy sections of those societies. So even in a raw responsibility term, the argument kind of makes no sense on its own grounds. Yeah, well done. And I absolutely agree.

And for the Andreas Malm point, we actually have an interview with Andreas Malm in our back catalog that people can search up if they're so inclined and interested in that he's a really interesting thinker and a useful one as well. So now that we have sort of done away with some of the major arguments, both within science and outside of science, regarding the ultimate causes of environmental destabilization, climate change, the six mass extinction, etc., let's move into the central point of your thesis, which is that capitalism, is the extinction event. is the primary causal factor in what we're seeing happen to the environment today. And so with that in mind, how does the internal logic of capitalism inevitably produce

environmental destruction, the likes of which we are seeing today? Okay, so there's, when we go to the relate, the claim is that the relation of capital specifically is the mass extinction event, grown to this kind of scale. And so we can begin with kind of the really simple kind of argument on, the source of value in the capitalist economy in order to get at why this is possible and what this means. And so in capital, Marx argues quite early on that all commodities have two things, two functions. One is an exchange value. This is how much they can sell for on a given market, and one is a use value, which is what they do in the world. And that these two things have nothing

in common with each other. You don't pay more for a chair because you happen to want to sit more at that moment in time, nor would you you expect it to have a certain value which is comparable to other objects similar to it. And so the only thing that can be deciding this can't be human need because there's no way of weighting one need against another in such a kind of scaled way. What has to be in common is that all of these commodities are products of human labor, and therefore as being products of human labor, they will possess the value. The reason that that can generate a profit is that human labour

under a capital society has also become a commodity which means that it is an object which can be bought and sold on the marketplace not labor itself that's a physical process of world but the capacity to work is and it's paid for at its value

and it's what it takes to reproduce the worker back at work the next day if we kind of put that in an assumed abstract sense the social average of that and so human labor can produce more value than it costs because, in a rough example, a human can bake more bread in one day than they need to consume to be able to bake the bread in that time. And that applies to all the kind of necessary elements of subsistence versus the output of labour.

So this is a very particular commodification. It being the commodity form of labour implies certain logical, structural and spatial dynamics to the way that the world is built. first of all, in order to run production this way, you need to have concentrations of workers, people who are there willing to sell their labour. There needs to be a market. And in order for that to happen, you can't have people living attached to land. You can't have them particularly very much living rural because they need to be centralised in one location in order to be bought easily, but then also they can't have any rural property

or why would they be selling their labour in the first place. And so there's a spatial relationship assumed with the way in which we interact with the land on a very fundamental level in Marx's critique as capitalism. And this is something that as capitalism continues to develop in industrialism, burdens, we see play out in incredibly bloody and horrific ways across the world. The kind of classical example of this being the clearances, which begin in around the 1300s in England. And that begins with landowners who see more profit in producing sheep for a growing Flemish market, simply selling the sheep and the wool on, clearing peasants who couldn't keep up with raised rents. So clearing them off the land and just kind of using and eases commercial sheep farms, which sees not only that process start, but then incredible

incursions against the ways that the majority of land in Britain in that time had been managed, which was as either a commons resource or as private property, therefore particular purposes in, say, a monastery, which tended to leave them quite still in terms of usage and therefore static in terms of presentation of ecosystems around them. And so once the peasants are chuffed away, we see a process giving us some staggering figures as peasants are played off the land and placed into the cities,

and that begins with kind of the development of kind of, these clearances, then large-scale agriculture follows, which leads to a monocrop and the uprooting of these diversities in these ecosystems leading to their eventual death. We see the draining of moorlands, the destruction of various different types of ecosystems in order to open up more land for pasture and to sell these things on. And then as people are grouped together in cities, increasingly or in large market towns and need to sell their labour as a commodity in order to survive, we see large-scale industry with pollution and so on. and so forth, and eventually steam and fossil fuel use begin to grow on that settlement pattern.

Now, that settlement pattern is the same settlement pattern that we see unfold in the Amazon, with, instead of, say, landlords kicking peasants off their land as the starting point of it, we see gangs going in and sees the land of, say, indigenous people in the Amazon, and using that to open mines and so on and so forth, carving roads into the rainforest, which then open land for agriculture, opens land for pasture and animal agriculture and then soybean cultivation and so on and so forth and leads to that concentration of people in cities. In those kind of examples, the British clearances in the Amazon, which other two would really go over to discuss this kind of logic. What we see

are the bare bones of capitalism's logic as a social structure. It needs people to be dispossessed and that disturbs the long-calative ecological relationships that people have with land or the very very possibility of making ecological relationships which are sustainable to the land, because everything is being purchased, sold for exchange. This stands in contrast to all previous societies,

which is something Marx points out, something very well articulated in Paul Burkett, the late Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature, but also very well expressed by a kind of a member of the newer theorist, Malm is among them as well. And this argument is that capitalism creates a

a fissure, and where all previous economies, and feudalism included, had been oriented around class dynamics, production had still been done for use. Even the kind of rent that a peasant gave the landlord who owned the land in which they lived would go towards, say, a military use. It would go towards stocking a larder or creating weapons. Whereas capitalism gets rid of this quite definite use for economic exchange and turns it into a quantitatively unlimited kind of motivation. And more than this, by the clearance of labour power, it can always secure more space for itself to operate, allowing it to overcome the localized ecological limits, which had seen other equally kind of ecocidal processes, stopped in their tracks with

civilizational collapse. Capitalism avoided that through this process of expansion, which is allowed from the way in which it commoditizes human labor. Now, when we fast forward past colonialism, imperialism, and all these things, we can see that pattern of development has become global. It unites oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems, both in terms of its raw plunderous power, in terms of overfishing, hunting of whales was a huge thing in there,

the modern capitalism there's a fuel source, pollution in a kind of direct poisoning of the water sense. All of those things draw the oceans into kind of the same process, but then obviously there's through the climate crisis as well, which is, if you follow Andreas Malm's kind of critique, which I do, then that was adopted as it's secured capitalism's needs in time and space, allowing concentrations of worker, and then deciding the amount of time that they had available to work, whereas water power, which was as abundant, as I've already said earlier, was spread out away from cities and concentrations

of people, and you're still subject to the time allotted to productions from nature, if there as a drought or a freeze you wouldn't be able to produce. And so capitalism is obviously a limitless tendency of expansion, but in doing so, it creates certain spatial conditions which now universalized have brought us to the limit of all global ecosystems. Yeah, just a masterful explication of the primary causal factor here rooted in the capitalist social relations and the commodity form of labor. Switching from the actual intellectual substance, which is very very, very important.

very elite in this documentary. I'm kind of going back to the project itself. And I'm curious because, you know, such an argument, it could be put into a book. It could be put into a lecture. There's a million different ways you could get this information across. But what would you say are the both challenges as well as the specific advantages that the visual medium of documentary making offer in relation to a project like this? So I think I can probably illustrate. straight in both the same example. So we spent a lot of time in the film looking at the Amazon

in particular, but then within that kind of the spread of illegal gold money. We chose that partly as a metaphorical thing because gold is a really striking metaphor for capital and capitalist exchange. It's something that registers with people quite intuitively, I think. But then also because

it really allowed us to get into some of the more horrific element. of this in a social sense to really lay bare those relationships as a very kind of explicit process because of how violent there. However, that presented both huge problems

and huge benefits. So the problem there is the amount of labour that goes in to try to find footage of this stuff if it's even available, which I mean, I don't know if I want to say thankfully, but it is for, I mean, I guess thankfully because people need to see, but it is

horrific to watch for these gold mines. And to give you an idea of the amount of work that goes into a process like that, we were at it by the end finding videos uploaded by individual miners in Brazil and Peru who had uploaded these things to YouTube as unnamed videos with just the location in the description and like MV number 178 as the video description, as the video title. And so it took us absolutely ages to find these things in terms of what they consisted of, we also had to sleep through a long period to try and find some kind of footage of the Anamami kind of genocide, which is, consists of sometimes a lot of armed and violent

attacks on indigenous villages, and we were able to find not only footage, but footage of the exact thing we were describing. But the amount of work there is a lot. And if you can't find things, you need to shift around what you're doing or adjust it occasionally to kind of fit that, require a lot of re-planning and restructuring a thing and you are ultimately limited to what can fit within legibly within a film of

a full of an hour and 45 minutes I think this one runs to and in limiting that there's a lot of material I came across in research that I think yeah does need to go somewhere that isn't a film but would have kind of damaged the flow of the thing so there's limits to what you can actually set

I think in terms of the structure of the form but the benefits are that we can make these things feel so emotionally close and like relatable in a way that I think documentary filmmaking needs to but tends not to in bourgeois kind of things unless it's being done for as a sort of old pity than charity things we're able to put these things in kind of emotionally visceral way in a way that kind of resonates back to the Marxist critique and that kind of political anger that I think people should feel about these things in a way that I think just writing about it does

but then kind of documentaries as they're produced in our society tend not to do that often. Yeah, absolutely. In keeping with that earlier point about a hyper object, just the visual onslaught

of what's happening in the world can make what is conventionally a hyper object more viscerally understandable and real. Just seeing the images stacked on top of each other with the narration explaining what's happening in the background. It makes the entire thing much more understandable and digestible for a single individual. So I think that the medium of documentary

filmmaking does allow for those distinct advantages, and you certainly make the most of them in this documentary. You mentioned the Marxist critique, and that's kind of a good segue into our next question. So we have some knowledge about the film itself and the making of it. We have the basic thesis and how capitalism, and specifically it's social relations and the commodity form of labor at the root of this crisis. And so now we can kind of think also about the critique and the opposition to that crisis and how we might go about solving it. And one way we can get at that is to talk about eco-socialism. So what is eco-socialism or eco-Marxism, in your opinion? And just kind of curiously, where are its roots in the communist tradition? I mean, I'm sure

some of these roots go back to Marx and angles themselves and perhaps even before them but yeah there's probably different inflection points throughout the communist and Marxist and socialist traditions where the environmental question emerges over and over again so can you talk about that a bit?

So what we would consider I guess eco-socialism and ego-Marxism in terms of if we would look at it as a specific field of thought is something that I think is actually quite late and arises primarily in the U.S. as a response to the green movement in the 70s and 80s.

And it has quite a few, this kind of early phase of modern eco-socialist thinkers, people like James O'Connor, a few other thinkers. I always get stuck on first wave eco-socialist thinkers off the top of my head. But yeah, there are quite a few thinkers involved in this. It's because of how many there are. they're a group of tendentially Marxist, socialist-ish kind of people, social democrats among them too, who have kind of want to draw in the lessons of the Green Movement and relate Marxism to it politically or at least some kind of socialist politics to it politically.

And they begin by kind of basically adopting similar kind of elements to their politics from the Green Movement, adding in a little bit more economics, but then also trying to re-relixt. read Marx and critique him from an ecological standpoint. The second wave of eco-socialism comes along in the sort of late 80s and early 90s. I imagine listeners would probably be more familiar with this wave. This is people like Paul Bacquet, John Bellamy Foster, books like

Marxist nature, Marx and nature, more recent ones kind of, yeah, a lot of different books there. And that kind of stretches up to the third wave, which is people like Jason W. Moore, kind of arguing with John Bellamy Foster, and all of these kind of people have various different things that they argue, but it tends to be quite an academic pursuit in the West, I think, generally.

A lot of the people involved in these things are academics, some descriptions, some scientific, some social sciences, and they kind of engage in this stuff as a way through which they try, to engage Marxism with ecological concerns and relate all the kind of common with its traditions to the newer challenge of trying to plan for a sustainable ecological future at the same time as hopefully a libertary class free one. And so that's quite a big, big melding part of thought. There are people who would argue and have argued quite thoroughly, called the Ket, John Balin and Foster in particular, that Marx has quite a considerable amount of ecological thought

I think parts of that are true and useful and then I think you could apply that to Stranzen Lenin's thought and so on and search forth as well and whilst those things are useful however I do think that this is an over-reliance within eco-socialism and you too tend to see a kind of there's a big pedigree in kind of greening earlier thinkers to kind of have them on your side within this kind of millier

which is probably to do with, I think, it being academically based. So that's what I think I would describe it as a kind of intellectual tendency, but I think it's also something that is quite important to understand has resulted from certain practical projects. There's a huge emphasis now in particularly Cuban Marxism on living with the land sustainably and how that can be done in a social. society and importance of that for a social society, so much so that there's now a commitment to that within the Constitution. There's Marxisms which have grown up around, say, the landless

workers, landless peasants, and landless workers movement in Brazil, and there's kind of stuff that's grown up around various different plan-based struggles, which wouldn't call it self-eco-socialist necessarily, but certainly has elements of that built into and it, and is probably quite important to think about in those terms. And yeah, so I think there's important distinctions there. The reason I do think those distinctions are important is I think that

Marxism in general should be concerned with things like the six mass extinction, the climate crisis, how we build toward a sustainable and equitable future. But then the way that the eco-socialism has been shaped in particular the West can tend to frame those debates in

either tactically kind of stalemates which can't be moved beyond within an intellectual sphere and strategically in relation to the movement, quite abstract thinking goes on in this sphere and there can be a huge amount of focus on kind of rescuing

older Marxist thinkers from accusations of kind of not caring about environment. And as I say, that can be useful, but it can also be blinkering. Yeah, I agree with that. And certainly by almost any definition, the prefix eco to Marxism in the 21st century is kind of redundant because any good Marxist will be

wrestling with this question at a deep level. So there's that aspect of it too. But you did mention Jason W. Moore and just another, you know, I like to in these discussions give people options to go learn more. And when I was working with the comrades over at guerrilla history, we had on Jason Moore. And the episode was called World Ecology and the Capitalist scene for those that want to dive deeper into his work and his ideas, which I do think are very. very useful and generative. So let's go ahead and move to this next question. We've certainly got at it in certain ways throughout this discussion already, but maybe there

is more to be said. And I really do appreciate the way that this is sort of centered in for land itself, which is the connections between colonialism, imperialism, and this ongoing devastation of the biosphere and the six mass extinction event. So how are colonialism and imperialism related directly to this process? I mean, so the first way we've definitely covered but it's perhaps worth hammering home with this is that they reproduce the logics, the anti-ecological logics

that dictate capitalism more broadly in terms of population concentration, the concentration of industry and the depletion of the rural population or leading to biodiversity decline pollution, so on and so forth. These processes replicate that on extended scale and of really violent scale, colonialism. For example, if we look at kind of some periods of Britain's history as an empire, we can see the largest concentrations of workers in human history in some of its slave colonies, same with France, particularly Haiti for France, and the largest

concentrations of humans ever seen before on the face of the earth at that point, horrific conditions, destructions of entire ecosystems, and they're bending toward of particular functions. So, for example, the British trade in sugar in the kind of Caribbean was so devastating that it accounted at one point for 25%. So economically significant and devastating, that it accounted for like 25% of Britain's total capital composition when you include things like the gunpowder and the slaves required to make it run alongside the world Shibga as well, so that's roughly

25% of the British Empire's economy. But it is also destroying these cultures and societies so profoundly that, like, the entire original society that was there had been worked to death before the conclusion of the economic arrangement had kind of ended.

And so psychologically devastating that many of these societies still relying on the export of sugar because it's the only thing that they can grow. we can look at kind of this kind of was a necessary thing for capitalist ecocide in order to maintain its elasticity

in order to manage the capacity to jump into beyond ecosystems that it's economically economic relations create it obviously needs to engage relations of force as well and we can see that in horrific examples

through the colonisation of the Americas through the child slave trade through various different imperialist adventures in Asia and the rest of the oppressed world. And so all of these things lead to first that externalisation, that externalisation of capital's relationships, and that they also allowed the capital centres to continue to function. Britain wouldn't have functioned without imperialism, and that's really evident when you consider at the beginning of the 1700s, I think about 10% of the flour used in British bread was from imports

and by the end of the century we're talking about 90%. And so the country was very directly like food line on its colonial project. And so all of this kind of process is necessary to keep that environmentally destructive

process of capitalist accumulation industrialization undergoing, the externalization of those population dynamics further, and then direct destruction as well as a way of terrorizing populations into submission and you can see that through numerous examples.

There's a lot of examples of that. And so it plays into this as a part of it where the clearances and the kind of creation of these relations is simultaneous with their spread through colonialism and periodism.

Absolutely. And amongst so many conclusions you can draw from that. One of them is that we have to remain incredibly skeptical. I mean, to the point of completely rejecting the idea that there could ever be a true, quote-unquote, green transition or a greening of capitalism. The processes of imperialism and colonialism are inexorably connected to the processes of capitalism itself. They can't be separated out. And as long as you were talking about the replication of those logics continues forth, you can never get to a truly

sustainable mode of being. And we see that in a million different examples from you know, the hubris and exploitation inherent in Elon Musk, who has presented or has been presented to us as, you know, one of the capitalists fighting for a greener future, all the way to the tragedies of the coal bolt mines in the Congo that is ongoing right now to dig up the necessary minerals to fuel many of the technologies, including electric vehicle batteries, that are ostensibly going to be used to make this green transition. So I think that's a, It's a, you know, a point that is just has to be addressed and has to be faced and has to be internalized. And we can never be sucked into the idea that capitalism is going to get us out of the crisis that its logics inexorably and necessarily create. So now that we have an understanding of the causes of the six mass extinction, the climate crisis, the assault on the biosphere writ large, the question remains, what is to be done, right? How can we solve these problems at their root? and what does it require of each one of us individually as well as collectively, in your opinion? So this is a complicated question which doesn't have any kind of said answers.

I think I can answer or give like an indication of where my thinking is at on three different levels. So the first of which is that in kind of a lot of pro kind of eco-servish list or climate-oriented communist politics, what we tend to see, and this is perhaps one of the most difficult to move debates in the kind of third and second and third wave of eco-socialist kind of conflict, is we kind of have a lot of stuck on very kind of technical development of plants, and we kind of argue about these things through the lens of ecomodernism and renewable technology, for example, or through the lens of degrowth and reduced consumption,

kind of agroecology. We kind of take these things to me, we argue, little different parts of the technical solution that we would like to see. And I think this is something about how the climate crisis and the 6-Nast extinction appear when you kind of look at them as problems to be solved. And whilst that can be useful,

we're not faced with the technical question. It's not just that the machines are wrong. It's not just that these kind of things are wrong. it's that the entire way our society is structured from like geography in a very geographic sense as well as a social relation sense as well as a power relation sense the way our economy is structured is inherently devastating and so the technical solutions are kind of secondary I think to the social one and I think this is where something that gets really hard because that means a lot more focus on strategy and strategizing around elements that he's

the communist movement in particularly Western nations, I would stress, has been historically terrible about, or it requires kind of actively engaging in social questions, which are also not too clear in terms of what you're trying to, in terms of how to get what you would like to see. And so one of the things I think we need to really wrestle with as a movement, particularly in the West, is that one of the core, the foundation of being able to react to either the biodiversity,

crisis or the sixth class extinction or the climate crisis, the basis for that has to come from some degree of land policy, which is a question that I don't think many communist and Marxist forces has wrestled with in the Western imperialist world for a very, very long time in a serious and substantive and transformative way. It's something that we talk about occasionally, but even when we look at degrowth, which has a very radical kind of proposal in relation to agoracology, and one that I mean sympathetically toward, How do we answer questions like the massive skill base that would be required, let alone if we can even get, begin to kind of articulate what kind of like redistribution of land would be needed and how do we manage that socially and ecologically? There are all really, really practical questions and they're not going to come out of anything outside of developing a rural communist strategy.

We're a very urban movement as Marxists. We have been for a long time and that's understandable given the kind of prerogative on industrial proletarian organizing, but then also the kind of concentrations of industrial poverty organizing that we have seen and how significant those have been relatively to rural areas, in particular Western advanced capitalists or imperialist nations. And so that's something that we need to reevaluate and kind of begin. However, that said, I also think we need to kind of, we need to be realistic about where we're at as a movement and kind of not assume that we can put everything into a program.

So it's about building those analyses up, whilst also wrestling with the kind of difficulties we have with the left as a whole of how to build a social project that's representative of a real working class movement and I think that's a really difficult question and not one I would like to kind of attempt to answer today but is one that we want to expand on moving forward as a platform and then I guess the final element to any response

is like there needs to be a lot less of a kind of focus as I said on technical elements and there needs to be more kind of strategising around land. But within that we have to remember that the core of what we're building has to be some kind of mass democracy and so we really need to kind of be thinking about that,

launching that as an ecological critique, understanding why these elements are important to a movement is not necessarily apparent, but it is something that I think we need to get a lot better at building up and building up these kind of common spaces for people to be able to actually relate about this question. Because the climate crisis isn't actually something that I think

will arise naturally out of economic conditions. It's something that we need to be building political consciousness around other questions in order to do that. So there's a bigger question open up there. Yeah. I mean, I think that is just indicative of the sober, you know, sober wide-eyed analysis that you're known for and, you know, the rejection of any quick and shallow silver bullets or mere platitudes when it comes to these solutions because they are very complicated. And a lot of this does just mean that we have to wrestle deeply with core problems of the left and of strategy going forward. So, yeah, important things to keep in mind. Now, as a way to sort of wrap up this discussion, it's important to note that

this documentary for Land is part one in an ideally three-part series. But it seems obvious that you need some help to finish this project. Can you talk about that and maybe how listeners who want to help such an important project can do so? Yeah. So in terms of the amount of time and amount of work, it takes us to create these feature length films versus what that does to the channel's income, it's not like feasible as a kind of thing we do up front.

And so this time we kind of want to, well, need to secure the kind of monthly minimum amount we would need to see, which I think would be $2,200 to $2,400 a month if we're accounting for both me and Vexi to make these films in a sustainable way. To give you context, the last, this film, Forland, we lost about $300 in six months of producing it. The overall span of producing it was one and a half years, and we lost about kind of $500 over that period because of the reduced imp output. We've gained all that back now with a fair bit more, but it is quite difficult for us to do that moving forward. It just doesn't gel well with YouTube's kind of algorithms, this approach to a little bit of videos,

and it is something we need more resources behind, both for kind of the sustainability of the work for ourselves. Both of us have got a lot more responsibilities than when we started doing protocol. We're a bit older, we've got a lot more going on, and so we need some kind of income and all that we dedicate the time to it. but then also in case we have any technical emergencies or anything like that, we really, really, really need to secure that income up front so that we have that kind of safety net, and we can work within our boundaries as well. The plan is that this would be the first part, which would look at, as we say,

looks at capitalism as extinction. The next part would look at how capital is failing to respond to it, and it would be called the limits to capital, which is a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the limits to growth, which is a very important ecological economic text, particularly in relation to the de-growth movement. And then finally, that film would look at, sorry, bourgeois conservation and so-called green technology

under capitalism, as well as tying that to the problem of war and land distribution and land economics under capitalism. And then finally, we'd want to look at resistance and strategy and class composition, which would look at the history of land struggles in under Cuban socialism, as well as the history of lands troubles through the landless workers movement in Bristol, and tying that into an analysis of land policy and class politics in imperialist Britain today. And all of that would try and wrestle with the

kind of what we do question in a strategic and political sense, moving through a variety of debates. And so we really want to make all three of these. They're going to take us a while to do. If the first one is anything to go on, we're a lot further. ahead on the kind of preliminary research for the other two, but we still need to have a kind of deeper research period to really get them right. But they are things that are very well planned out. We have a document on our Patreon, which goes over everything we'd like to do, our filmmaking process and the financial requirements. So if you are interested, please please do look us up and get involved and give us some support. Yeah, so directly helping via

Patreon to create the material foundation to allow Lexi and James to continue this really the important series is one and probably the most important way that anybody out there with some disposable income can really help this project move forward, but certainly also watching it, sharing it, using it within your organization for political education around this really important issue is another way you can do it, liking, commenting on the video. These are tiny things, but they do help boost the algorithm a bit, but, you know, a big hour, 45-minute documentary on the Marxist critique of capitalist, you know, eco-side is not necessarily. necessarily one of the things that the YouTube algorithm loves to throw up in your 4-Me feed.

But, you know, the more comments and likes that that get, I'm sure it helps a bit with that. But yeah, watch it, share it, support it directly. Really important stuff. I really appreciate all the work that you put in to these projects. Shout out to Lexi, who couldn't be here today, but is obviously a part of the team that makes all this happen. And with all of that in mind, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, find this documentary and any other of your work online? yeah so you can find all of our work on patreon at patreon.com forward slash protocol and it's all linked there for with free access to all mainstream content content that we put out with some

patron and new stuff but not very much and then we also have a youtube channel youtube.com forward slash protocol where you can check out just the video is so yeah wonderful and i'll link to those in the show notes so people can easily access them show them some love support watch it, etc. Thank you so much, James, for everything you do and for coming on Rev Left once again and being generous with your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having us on. It's been a pleasure to speak as always. Yeah, love what you do. You're packing the packages. The water coming in disastrous. I'm getting bottles of water in matches because it's hatchet. It's immaculate hate. And Montecutes versus the capitalist

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Thank you.