Upstream - The Exhausted of the Earth w/ Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Exhaustion. What a perfect and powerful word to describe our times. Exhausted bodies—over-worked, over-productive, over-stretched. Bodies pushed to their limits, treated like machines whose sole existence is to produce profit. Exhausted ecosystems—extracted, ruined, plundered. Viewed as nothing but raw material for the ceaseless flow of capital accumulation. Exhausted minds—hurried and harried, no time for joy, for introspection, for pondering the cosmos. Our minds are tethered to an orbit delineated by distraction, denial, and despair. Exhaustion. 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record—and unless you’ve been consciously avoiding it you’ve probably seen the videos of the devastating floods, wildfires, and “once in a thousand years” storms that are increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives. The reality of climate change is no longer one of the future, one that can be framed in a discussion about coming generations—it’s here already. And it’s not even a question anymore of capitalism being the driving factor—that’s an old conversation. The question now is: what are we going to do about it? How do we respond, right now? Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and core faculty member specializing in social and political theory and author of The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, published by Repeater Books. In this episode, we analyze and unpack the many forms of exhaustion that shape us and our world today. We explore the politics of climate change, from right-wing climate responses to those coming from the left, we explore the extractive circuit of capitalism as it stretches its tentacles from lithium mines in The DRC to Doordash drivers in the suburbs of the West. We explore imperialism, Marxist theory, revolutionary classes, revolutionary strategies, and why the “exhausted of the earth” are the mass political subject of our times. Further Resources The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, by Ajay Singh Chaudhary Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Related Episodes: The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad Degrowth vs Eco-Modernism Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea Climate Leninism w/ Jodi Dean and Kai Heron Intermission music: "Non-Metaphorical Decolonization" by Mount Eerie Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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of mirage. And I will call it a mirage. And it was limited as well to only certain segments of the population of what the French called the 30 glorious years where it was like, oh, a rising tide raises all ships. So therefore if the firms are doing better, I'm doing better. If the state's doing better, I'm doing better. That's gone. And some people say, well, bring that back.

Well, first, A, you can't do it. Conditions have changed. B, something better is out there. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Exhaustion. What a perfect and powerful word to describe our times. Exhausted bodies, overworked, overproductive, overstretched, bodies pushed to their limits, treated like machines whose sole existence is to produce profit.

Exhausted ecosystems, extracted, ruined, plundered, viewed as nothing but raw material for the ceaseless flow of capital accumulation. Exhausted minds, hurried and harried, no time for joy, for introspection, for pondering the cosmos. Our minds are tethered to an orbit delineated by distraction, denial, and despair. Exhaustion. 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record. And unless you've been consciously avoiding it, you've probably seen the videos of devastating floods,

wildfires, and once-in-a-thousand-year storms that are increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives. The reality of climate change is no longer one of the future, one that can be framed in a discussion about coming generations. It's here already. And it's not even a question anymore of capitalism being the driving factor.

That's an old conversation. The question now is, what are we going to do about it? How do we respond right now? Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and core faculty member specializing in social and political theory and author of The Exhausted of the Earth, Politics in a Burning World published by Repeater Books. In this

episode we analyze and unpack the many forms of exhaustion that shape us and our world today. We explore the politics of climate change from right-wing climate responses to those coming from the left. We explore the extractive circuit of capitalism as it stretches its tentacles from lithium mines in the DRC to door-dash drivers in the suburbs of the West. We explore imperialism, Marxist theory, revolutionary classes, revolutionary strategies, and why the exhausted of the earth are the mass political subject of our times. And

before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one time donation on our website upstream podcast dot org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this

whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Jay, it is great to have you on the show. Thank you, Robert. It's great to be here. I am wondering if we can start maybe with just an introduction, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing.

Hi, my name is Jason Charlery. I'm the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and our core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. There's a lot to say about Brooklyn Institute, which I probably won't right now, other than we're a very, very large education and research organization, principally giving seminars to working adults all around the country and the world. And this particular work is something I've been researching and then writing for a very long time

and almost embarrassingly long time. It came about because frankly, I thought that there wasn't a lot of sort of soup to nuts political theory concerning climate. And that climate was to me the issue that, not only, I'm not trying to give it supremacy, it's not the only issue, but it was the issue of connective tissue between so many different crises that we're facing. And it has many unique properties and unique qualities that make it extremely

Difficult to just sort of staple climate on to existing political theories and and ways of doing politics So yeah, actually we're here to talk all about that and talk all about the the exhausted of the earth So I'd love it if maybe you could just go a little bit deeper and sort of help us understand a little bit more even though you kind of just laid this out. But what did you really hope to accomplish with the book when you set out to write it? And what were sort of the main theses or the main points that you were hoping to convey to readers when you were writing it? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, I kind of give a short version of this at the top. I'm happy to go further. Well, the first thing I should say about the exhaustion angle is it's not the one that actually like set out looking for.

I set out to do like, okay, I'm going to do political theory of climate change. I set out to do like, okay, I'm going to do political theory of climate change. And then to me, what does that mean? It means I need to be able to answer sort of a who, what, when, where, why, how, all those kind of basic questions that people might ask. And especially, you know, I just said this, but especially in ways that deal with the unique aspects of climate change for pre-existing political theory, one of which is the intensity and scope of the phenomenon, right? It is extremely, its effects are far reaching, let's put it that way.

Its causes are far reaching. And its timeline is very, very short. And there's not like a lot of redos. So one of the classic examples I give, whatever part of the political spectrum you're on, is usually a lot of your political thinking, a lot of your political strategizing is like, well, if we don't get it this year, we'll get them next time. Or like, okay, we're going to regroup and spend 10 years working on this and spread out our like organizational cells and things like this. Well, climate kind of throws a spanner in that.

And there was a lot of really great work coming out when I started this project. But most of it was focusing very much on single aspects of the climate crisis or maybe providing some policy positions, but very little that was trying to sort of do this true sort of total political theory that does what I what I hope the book does. And then along the way of trying to do that and to do it seriously.

So it required learning a lot of natural science as much as I could. I don't come from a natural science background, but I know more than the average bear. And I talked about that in the book. So I tried to sort of learn all that material, but also that's where the exhaustion stuff enters in because both in the ecological literatures and then in the social literatures that I was sort of working from and researching,

you could not escape this as a phenomenon and not just as this kind of like allegorical or metaphorical one that literally, as I sort of try to describe in the second chapter of the book, you can sort of trace out and see what I call the extractive circuit, right? These these sort of zones of extraction and exhaustion across the world that do in fact sort of crisscross what some people call the sort of metabolic relation between society and its ecological niche, or you could just say simply, yeah, that sort of bridge or constantly crossing over what we might describe as society and its ecological niche. CB Yeah, I really resonated with the centering of exhaustion. RL Yeah, people feel it, man. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's more to say. I mean, I should actually have added that the other thing about exhaustion that in addition to just being everywhere is more than a lot of classical categories.

So like I could have written this and used like very classic categories. Like I do use many of them, like exploitation, alienation, things like that. But this is the one that people would openly profess in their own words as what they are feeling currently. And I think that's very important. And I also think it's really interesting too, because it just so happened that I had on my bookshelf in the stack of books that I'm kind of making my way through, Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis.

Oh, that's so fun. making my way through Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis. Oh, that's so fun. And yeah, as I started reading it, I realized that like you both had sort of part of, part of what you're doing is a shared project of finding a revolutionary class in late capitalist society now, right? Like this idea that the classic proletariat,

working class, right? People that are currently engaged in wage labor, are not only vastly not the majority of the population, so that we can't necessarily map on the analyses that Marx made about the working class and just apply them mechanically onto where we're at now. And this project of looking for who is the revolutionary class now? What are the revolutionary classes?

What ties them together? What sort of overlaps are there that we can tap into when we begin to analyze how we might fight against some of the stuff that you're talking about in the book? So yeah, I thought that was a very interesting parallel. And I don't know if there's anything else that you wanna add to that or say to that before we kind of go through and talk about it.

Oh, absolutely. I'll say some just very quickly. One is, the way you put it, like wage labor, et cetera, et cetera, is ever so slightly different than Marx's class theory. Marx himself never actually really fully wrote out class theory. It was like he planned, I think, four or five volumes of Capital and never actually got to all of them. And yes, this idea that got developed, especially towards the end of the late 19th

century, that it's the urban industrial proletariat that is the sort of true working class. And then you get like maybe concentric circles of other people around this. That seems to not be the clearest case on earth. There are lots of people who are like proletarianized or are experiencing downward mobility of these kinds of things. So we can talk about those boundaries or those sort of blocks. We can talk about, of course, especially in the global south peasants, but also in the global north, small landholders,

which is a dicey category in Marxism because that's sort of petit bourgeois. And this is also one of the reasons why I turned Chiffon on so much. There's a lot of reasons, but one of them is that he's like, look, in a lot of these real situations of decolonization, I do think there's a kind of is real situations of decolonization, I do think there's a kind of isomorphism between decolonization and climate politics.

He's like, you have to sort of stretch things around a bit. And when you're dealing with the real world and not just a pure sort of plane of abstraction, you're often dealing with an imprecise and sort of stretched and complex object. And in many ways, this is not a shocking observation of phenomes because if you look at any of the sort of great, whether you're talking about revolutionary politics, freedom reformist movements, they're almost always coalitional, imprecise,

they don't capture everyone. And as we approach the contemporary day, and I think this is where where you are sort of referencing, we have this proliferation of surplus population of people who are just in the sort of way in which I use it. And I think many other folks who are coming out of marketing traditions use it are just not necessarily, I hate to even use this word, but like needed for the function of capitalism like capitalism's like yeah They can live or die and we've got replacement population enough to deal with that and it's like the coldest way of looking at The world but it is kind of reflecting the realities we live in

Yeah, sorry, that's not very like Cheer We're not really a Well, we're not really a cheery podcast necessarily. We try to, but I mean, how the fuck are you going to do that right now? I think we have to be real about what's going on. Well, that's part of the goal of the book. Yeah. Speaking of which, you take some time examining this idea of right wing climate realism. Yeah.

I'd love to shift back to explicitly talking about climate change for a minute here and talk about this idea of right wing climate realism and why when it comes to the impacts of climate change, as I think you titled the first chapter of your book, we're quote, not in this together. Yeah, OK. So the right wing climate climate realism thing in many ways

is actually like the proper introduction to the book. The book's a little weird structurally, right? I got this kind of like prologue and then we just jump right in. But chapter one is actually kind of an overview in some ways and it starts off with right-wing climate realism. So why? There's a couple of reasons,

but so I'll try to give this in a sort of as brief a form as I can. You know, I tend to be a little wordy, but nonetheless, again, when I was starting on this project, but sadly still to this day, a lot of folks, including and again, this is a pretty broad section of the political spectrum. So I'm not just talking about center right, center left here, but also left left and to a degree right, but we'll talk about that in a moment. Still sort of approach climate as this like, oh, if you believe in like,

you know those like yard signs, right? You stick them in the ground and it's like, in this house we believe in science. Well, first of all, like the scientific endeavor is not supposed to be the kind of thing that requires this Kierkegaardian leap of faith into the unknown. It's actually this probabilistic, I mean, there's different ways of presenting the scientific method from different aspects of the theoretical and applied sciences. But like one thing they basically share is like, this is like probabilistically true knowledge that you do not need like deep metaphysical

commitments to believe in. But secondly, like there is a kind of like phantom scientism hiding behind that, that oh, if only everyone believed the facts, then we'd all do the correct politics. then we'd all do the correct politics, right? And what I had discovered very quickly in my earliest research, and then it was just plainly obvious as I spread out. And you don't find this by reading like New York Times, you find this by reading like trade journals and like investor reports and stuff like this,

was that a lot of the people we would, I think, associate with the right and be like, I talk a lot, I joke about Rex Tillerson because I wrote that part during the first Trump administration. I'm like, Rex is not a dumb guy. So people that don't recognize the name, right, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, former Secretary of State of the United States. He's not an idiot. In fact, he is very open about being like climate

changes, real and all this kind of stuff. But Rex just looks at the numbers and is like, so you're telling me or someone like Rex, it's not personal. As I say in the book, if Rex like had a come to Jesus moment and was like, oh my God, let's not destroy the world. They just fire him and hire someone else to do that work or whoever is the new CEO of ExxonMobil. So like part of the reality is yes, you have Looney Tunes people like Donald Trump or like who is the guy with the snowball in Congress, James Inhofe, like right, who are actual climate deniers. But right here in the United States, the world capital of climate denial, which is 100%

true, it's an ultra minority position at this point, even on the right. It's like 20 or 30%, it's tiny. And when you read all these more serious right wing pieces or analyses of climate, you don't come away with denialism. You just, you come away with a different version of their climate plan. And it stretches from sort from pretty prosaic stuff to some pretty extreme stuff.

And when I say pretty extreme, I mean very extreme. So the more prosaic simple answer that I think begins to answer the we're not in this together is that for the vast majority of people on earth, which doesn't just mean global south versus global north, but also majorities just global south versus global north, but also like majorities just smaller within the global north, the sort of most basic and again, this is barely even like Marxist social theory. This is almost like a kind of quasi utilitarianism. Like for the vast majority of people doing it thorough and doing it fast, right? Mitigation and adaptation is in our best interest from like a million different angles, not only an ecological angle, but also like a social quality of life angle

from almost any way you look at it. That's great. The sort of first sort of way of understanding right when climate realism is folks looking at those same numbers and same data and being like, oh, fuck though. If we just go a little slower, if we're not so thorough, if we, yeah, okay, so we're going to hit three to four degrees change over industrial baseline, right? Now climate scientists will be like, holy fuck, don't do that. That sounds fucking horrific.

But again, the calculus is pretty straightforward. It's like, yeah, okay. So you're selling me, we're going to probably lose capacity for like a billion people. There's going to be, or like several hundred more million people are going to be refugees, you know, this kind of stuff. But I don't have to spend like $70 trillion or like we either destroy that amount of value or redistribute it right now. Well, I choose that, right? That's the sort of beginning of Brighton and Kahn realism. It's slower and like willing to say, fuck off to a whole bunch of people. The more sort of radical stuff that I get to quite quickly is that, and this is again

where I think the sort of truth of not siloing climate issues into just like climate policy is so important. If you look at the increased attention, for example, to borders in recent years and policing them, that is a good right-wing good. I'm not saying good as like a normative position here, a realistic right-wing response to increased human migration driven by socioeconomic and socio-ecological factors, right? Not the response I want, but it's totally, it does in fact make sense. If you look at the United States military, there's all this retrofitting for different kinds of sea levels, for different kinds of salinization points in the ocean and things like this. And there's not like the nothing. People are willing to do some stuff on the

right from the sort of capital side, but it's like extremely slow and extremely limited. And then again, this stretches all the way then to the right. And I do talk about this again, that first chapter with the sort of eco fascist formations I focus particularly on Europe because that's where they're like actually in power like you can find like right now the German greens are like the most militarized like they're one of the most pro like war parties in Germany which which is fucking wild in Austria. I talk about Austria. There's like the far right and the greens, their version of the greens,

like running together or making government coalitions. And the joke, and sadly this didn't make it into the book because some of the stuff came out later. The joke I started making of it's not very funny. Um, when I was talking about this book in Europe is like, the sort of pitch of that stuff is like good, clean living for good, clean people. And like, let's make sure that like the darker peoples, the unwanted, the poor, the homeless, whatever, that they don't like eat up all of our precious resources. And this is

kind of dumb and malphusianism. We can sort of make fun of it and laugh, but it's serious politics. And it's not dumb politics either. And I think that's the other side of what I want to get at with right when climate realism, this idea that the right is dumb and that it has no projects of its own.

It seems to me completely wrongheaded. It has projects of its own. And it seems to actually have a pretty decent understanding of its own. It seems to me completely wrongheaded. It has projects of its own, and it seems to actually have a pretty decent understanding of the world. One of my favorite examples of this, I do cite in the book, but it's in one of those like 8 billion word footnotes, so I'm not sure if everyone reads it. But like in the first Trump administration, one of his departments, and I forget which, put out, you know, the overarching policy was let's repeal the Obama era, like tailpipe admission standards. And what this 800 page Trump administration report did

was not this exercise in climate denialism. It was actually very realistic in this sort of shocking, but also frightening way where they're like, these tailpipe emission standards compared to the scale of the problem are just meaningless. Like literally they will have no effect on the problem. So why even bother? I mean, it's like 800 pages of this, but that is in fact true. It is in fact truer than the like, oh, we want a small little victory with tailpipe admissions regulations.

Yeah. A victory which you can sort of hold up and then use to sort of trick people into thinking that you've done something. And you can say, yeah, I'm serious about climate. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the extractive circuit and I do really love that way that you frame that. I don't know if that's something that you came up

with yourself or if that's just a- Oh yeah, that's an original term. Yeah, I really appreciate it because it does such a good job of sort of describing these zigzagging networks of like global value chains and you talk about like literal caste and slave labor and all these other components that go into creating actually existing capitalism and you know I'm wondering if you can maybe just talk a little bit more about the extractive circuit, maybe illustrating it with some examples if you think that might help to draw it out for people and then maybe I might poke and prod a little bit more to ask you more.

But I'd love if we could just start off with in your own words, like how you would describe that. Yeah, I'll do my absolute best. I will admit, as I have many times on both interviews like this and in sort of other written things, it's far and away the most technical part of the book. So it's a little hard to explain very quickly, but I will say that like what it is supposed to be

is a portrait of what capitalism is like plugged back into its ecological context. And I'm not the first person to try this, but I really try to show just how interconnected these things are, tracing sites of production, distribution and consumption. Right. And also problematizing some of those categories in ways that might come out, I think, in some of the follow ups. But in a nutshell, right. And you and you say maybe we can use an example, so I'll use my favorite example,

the cell phone, or the smartphone. I use this in class all the time because it's just a very convenient commodity to explain things. So if I'm talking about, or if you're interested in the history of capitalism and things like this, you can think back to like, oh, there was the Fortis factory at one point. The genius of the Fortis factory is everything is within the factory walls. Over there is your tire guys, over there is your axle guys, over here is your chassis guys, over here is your design guys, over here is your final construction guys. It's all just kind of in the same zone, yada, yada, yada. And then you even get like Taylor ization of stuff like that. So like real sort of management science, like let's make this as efficient as possible. As we approach the present day, it's not just around post-bordering,

which is something people already were talking about like way back in the day, and then especially with neoliberalism. But with fully globalized production, a commodity like a smartphone is made in 80-something places. It's hard for me to even remember. It could probably be higher or maybe a little bit lower, but it's very large. So you've got things like, you know, design firms and coding happening in places like California, but also being outsourced to places like Southeast Asia. You've got chip manufacturing principally in places like Taiwan, but you know, a little bit elsewhere, final construction, China. One of the things I focus on a lot in the book,

just as a really good illustration of just how extreme this stuff is, is the cobalt mining in a place like Democratic Republic of Congo, literal slave labor, literal child labor, people holding guns so other people work for free. I mean, I don't know how much more of a pure definition of slavery you can get. All of that goes into the phone, right? And then if we're thinking about those mines, those are also ecological sacrifice zones. If we're thinking about carbon emissions or other greenhouse gas emissions, something like, again, I'm not going to get the exact number right, but 78%, I believe, of the emissions are in the final construction. So that's all

going on the technical national accounts of China, even if the phone's being used in Norway or in Queens where I live. Then by the way, also in a lot of the climate treaties, things like shipping, things like aviation aren't always counted. It becomes this really sort of horrifying vicious cycle where globalization was initially used to like spread comparative advantage.

And then it became also entwined with what is variously called like sort of just in time production or lean production and whatnot. All this stuff that is incredibly tight to keep up margins, because margins of global growth has been slowing for a long time. Margins can be harder to achieve, although you can still get very high margins by becoming a very large corpus, things like this. One of the ways of doing this is to do this kind of just-in-time stuff, which is great for profits, great for managers, great for owners, fantastic stuff.

Again, I hope people understand I'm saying fantastic from their point of view. But if you're talking about like the workers trying to like put the shit together or the people being forced to mind for this, or the people who are trying to like, I don't know, just do delivery and stuff like this on the last mile, as it said in the business. I don't know, just do delivery and stuff like this on the last mile, as it said in the business. This is like nightmare conditions. That's without even getting into some of the stuff I get into the book where you find, and again, this actually touches on your open question about the working class. It's not that I'm against class theory at all. I just think we do need to stretch things. So for example, one of the things I point out is a refugee is hard to describe as being exploited in the classic Marxist sense, but tech companies have figured it out. One of the ways is to hand people some apps and have them use them while they're in fucking detention centers and refugee

camps and collect a bunch of data on how people use things, and you can just squeeze a little more value, a little more profit out of things. And that is, I think, the nature of the extractive circuit. And the other thing to, again, put this back into climatological terms is there's all these debates about decoupling and absolute decoupling and relative decoupling. But when you look at this global scale, at this real thing, which is not national border production. That doesn't mean nations are gone and imperialism and stuff like that is gone. It doesn't mean that at all. But what it does mean is that the ecological effects and what we need to be measuring are global. And globally, we see actually something far, far different from either absolute or even relative decoupling, which is that in fact, we have

a slowing global growth curve and an increasing amount of both sort of what's called material throughput in the technical and natural scientific literature and the sort of ecological economics literature, which people can think of more prosaically or more colloquially as just like the amount of stuff that's going into things is Increasing and also of course if we want to use the most carbon focused Atmospheric carbon concentration is actually increasing. It's not bending down. Although I have minor hopes that it might in coming years Can you talk a little bit about the, I think I love the example of the smartphone and we actually recently talked to Vijay Prashad on the DRC and

talking about Glencore and you know the horrific conditions and in those minds. Some of the same material. Some of the very same material yeah so very a very nice overlap for our listeners but I also was really interested in the other side of the extractive circuit when it comes to smartphones. And this idea, you talk about how like exhaustion is profitable. And I'd like to read a passage actually from the book where you describe the growing arsenal of services like DoorDash or Amazon Prime Delivery.

So this is a quote from the book. We should see these quote services instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers, but rather to the needs of an always on capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. They don't strictly fulfill consumption ends. They are also part of production. Every moment of life is integrated, profitable, from literal labor hours to the production

of micro units of digital value via social media and other avenues, in the hours for what we will." I really appreciated that whole section and the way that profit is just squeezed out of our exhausted bodies, our exhausted world so thoroughly by capital. It just made me really think about the profitability of exhaustion, as you put it in the book in many different ways. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that too, and how a lot of the apps that we use and also the way that you bring in Mark Fisher's work in capitalist realism,

and how it's just almost impossible to think outside of the reality of capitalism. And this is like related to the way that our exhaustion and the productivity and the always onness of our lives is such a thorough part of this whole extractive circuit and the way the profit is squeezed out of us in all these different ways from the slave labor and the DRC to door dash delivery. You know, it's all connected through exhaustion. Yeah, I'm really happy you brought this up. I actually didn't get a chance to talk about this part of that chapter too much.

And it's one of my favorites. Because yeah, a lot of times when we talk about these kinds of services, we do discuss them as consumption. And part of the sort of broader, more analytic part of that whole extractive circuit portrait is to show also how very disparate peoples facing very disparate challenges in very disparate ways. I'm not trying to say like a slave laborer in the the same thing as a lower middle class, what did I say, like office worker in California. That is not my point at all. My point though is that they are connected through these systems and the person who capital decides to have one of these things, it's not just this frivolous

device. You have to get it and you have to buy the new one and you have to get it, right? And you have to buy the new one. And you have to upgrade to, I don't know, Windows 11, apparently, I just got an email about that this morning. You have to do these things, not because you want to, not because you desire to. And this is where I get into some of those like services as well, right? Like partly people have turned to these things out of desperation because they are facing time binds. And then ironically, right, the person who is, they are like, I mean, by the like letter of the law now, like, like semi free contracting with, even though that's completely bullshit are themselves using the same tools to figure out how to squeeze just a little more out of themselves. So on the one hand, you've got the people who extreme exploitation, extreme exhaustion,

going into the production end. But then a lot of the consumption end is also production. I make up these characters, but they're not characters, that's sort of a thought experiment or philosophical anthropology. They're real people, basically, because what phones do for that sort of like low tier office worker, right? It allows her to work longer hours predominantly. And how does she make up for that time? Well, she has a second shift because we never never dealt with gender parity in this country or any other, frankly. And so she outsources it to this other person. And often, I think we would think of these people as being an antagonistic relationship. And part of the exhaustion frame and part of using these kinds of people to illustrate what's happening

in the extractive circuit is hopefully to see for people to see there is a shared ground that exists today that did not exist maybe 60, 70, 80 years ago for solidarities across what might seem like unlikely barriers or borders. Actually, that idea of solidarity shared through this sort of broader idea of exhaustion is, I found it really interesting. And there's like certain passages where you talk about the fruits of imperialism sort of drying up because, you know, this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, this

idea that there was like a period where the spoils of colonialism and imperialism did accrue somewhat, you know, even if they were still just crumbs to a certain substratum of the working class, right? And that led to that class investing itself somewhat, if not consciously on a cellular level to the whole imperialist project in a way. And there is this sort of buy-in which feels like is not really there anymore. It feels like that's in decline. And as you write in the book, and I think you're drawing here from the work of Samir Amin when you talk about imperialism rent,

right? Like this idea that imperialism rent is now flowing increasingly into the coffers of capital and less and less of the fruits of imperialist oppression and super exploitation and extraction, less and less of that is being quote enjoyed end quote by by those of us in the West. And actually have a quote here from the book you write, for the first time in modern history, the vast majority of workers and communities in the global north have a mundane material interest in the wealth and power of people and states in the global south.

And so drawing on this, the end of your last response where you were talking about this sort of solidarity, I'd love it if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that. Absolutely. This is another really important point talking about this sort of solidarity. I'd love it if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that. Absolutely. This is another really important point and it ties into some of the extractive circuit stuff

because I think most people, or not most, a lot of people have heard probably what I think of as a pretty decent account of the sort of rise of neoliberalism, intellectual history of this stuff goes way back, but it's particularly looking at the early 70s as this inflection point. When it started to become very difficult to maintain that kind of payoff that imperialism rent would guarantee to use a means term, there became less room for maneuver. Again, global growth curve starts slowing down. That really hit later.

There starts to be a crisis in capital and this both plays out on this labor discipline level. You start getting really wild stuff in the early 70s. For example, one of the best examples, I think I actually use this in the book, is auto workers in the US demanding not higher wages, but being like, I want to design the car. That is taking over the means of production and stuff, being like, I'm pretty sure I know how to make a car better than you do, that kind of stuff. So it hits a sort of crisis point. One of the things that happens with the institution of things like globalization,

those lean production methods, just in time, all that kind of stuff that I was talking about before, is it all, it manages to claw back for the capital share as against the labor share. Now, this is very classic standard, I would say, Marxian understanding of neoliberalism, yada, yada, yada, yada. What you're talking about is to me, even more important, which is like, if I'm like a 1955 French, I don't know, I don't want to keep using autoworkers, some other worker,

whether they be in almost any sector, or British or American, whatever, it doesn't really matter. I did for a brief period of time, like if the national economy is doing well, I'm doing well. If like I work for Ford and Ford is doing well, I am doing well. And so yes, I love how the way you put it can be conscious, it could be unconscious, but nonetheless, I have both sort of objective interests, but also perhaps psychological unconscious investments. So we can talk about this in two different ways in the success of my employer and then the success of my country. And increasingly, as we get to today, and this can seem sort of like I'm looking for a silver lining and hard, There is a lot of disaggregation there. I think let's go back to the previous question, an example, like those guys doing the last mile

delivery for Amazon, not very attached or the people working in Amazon warehouses, not very attached to Amazon as like a libidinal investment, nor as a objective one. Pretty upset actually about their working conditions. I hate to use election stuff because I feel like election analysis is like a vortex into which everything gets sucked in and dies. But you also see this, I think, in the pattern of global blow it up elections that have been happening for the past now, decade plus, where sort of any opportunity within, I don't consider Western democracies to actually be democracies. I think we should just stop using that word. We don't live in them. They don't really exist. But anytime people are given like any access to choice, they're like, I choose blow it up. And that to me is also

decent evidence. I try not to overuse polls. I'm very skeptical. I do use a lot of polling and survey data in the book, but I hope in a kind of skeptical way that I try to explain. But simply to say that this is all very good evidence that these things are disaggregating. Very few people. And the thing I was gonna say about the election before

in addition to the blow it up character is the ways in which you consistently see people citing this, basically saying like, things are not working for me anymore at all. And then people will respond with like, well, here's look, American GDP is way better than European GDP, right? In OECD states. And that has no meaning to actual lived experience of what it is to be in our societies,

whether you are employed, whether you are unemployed, whether you're in a surplus population, whether you're a migrant worker working in agricultural sector, whether you are in fact a downloadly mobile worker in a white collar sector, the actual objective reality and the feeling of this is totally different than that sort of mirage. And I will call it a mirage.

And it was limited as well to only certain segments of the population of what the French called the 30 glorious years, where it was like, oh, a rising tide raises all ships. So therefore if the firms are doing better, I'm doing better. If the state's doing better, I'm doing better. That's gone. And some people say, well, bring that back. Well, first, A, you can't do it. Conditions have changed. B, something better is out there, which is a hopes part of the project that is outlined here, which is that actually a sustainable life, even if you don't give a flying fuck about the environment, but all the things

you would have to do to achieve a sustainable ecological life just so happen, this is not actually not just so happen, this is part of why the extractive material is so important, are what would address the conditions of exhaustion and discontent in society. Yeah, so really presenting that sort of the humanism within it is apparent, right? Like we can all think about the moralistic arguments why we should be in solidarity with the global south, et cetera, but also just from an objective sort

of material outlook. May I add just one thing? Absolutely, yeah. A really clear example of this that I use in the book and that I also think is illustrative if people are just like hearing this material for the first time. The other thing that's globalized that people forget is like security surveillance and like all kinds of stuff like this.

So sometimes it's literally the same corporations, the same firms, even sometimes the same personnel who are like going back and forth from like policing those mines in Central Africa to strike breaking in North America, literally the same security firms. If the Congo, for example, were to achieve a level of sovereignty above neocolonialism, it would actually, for example, aid unionization efforts in like Toronto. Like, these things are all now so deeply interconnected that there's all kinds of new, both political

and sort of quasi-utopian horizons to open up. Right. Another thing on that connection with surveillance, et cetera, when you think about how a lot of the police forces in the United States trained with the IDF in Israel, for example, a very direct connection there between Gaza and our major cities. Yeah. And in fact, if you're someone who's a crazy person like me and do you read trade journals and stuff, That is also how Israel sold a lot of its weapons systems. It was like battle tested on the most hardcore terrorists and the most hard populations to control. And who buys this stuff? A lot of the Western, like there's always been this over

investment in Israel. It's very complicated, whatever. But one of the ones that I think underlines the current like sort of extreme over investment in the West right now is that a lot of countries, a lot of political actors, parties, corporations, like bought this line and we're like, Oh, if we just buy this surveillance tech, this will work for our camps. This will work for our borders. This will work for our undesirable urban and rural populations. And we can just use this shit and we'll just be fine.

And then like, I mean, people will think I'm a crazy for saying this, so you can cut it if you want, you know, Hamas comes out and like for all what you might think one way or the other about what happened, like at the very least you have to acknowledge that they showed that you could in fact fight through these systems with some pretty low technology solutions. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary. We'll be right back. Very nice. I'm gonna be a man. Oh, I know. So So The place I live has a name But there's another one, older Emerging through the mist I saw where I was, as it was Before we called it anything

Now we live in the wreckage of a colonizing force Whose racist poison still flows So scared of a moment of discomfort Now we turn away from the obvious All we have is stolen and can't be owned This America, the old idea I wanted to die I wanted to die Non-metaphorical decolonization Beneath the one sky Let this old world shatter

And transform Transform Origins to nothing at all But the blind president will move I'd cut the cord connecting the magnet And start again I'd show the kid how to give up everything That was Non-Metaphorical Decolonization by Mount Eerie. Now back to our conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary.

I want to go back to, let's talk directly about climate change for a minute. I really appreciated this section where you went through and kind of, you know, you had a scathing critique of what we might refer to as eco-modernism related as well to what you call climate lysenkoism. And in that section of the book, you talk about sort of the, what we might call the techno-optimist umbrella and what you clarify to actually be a sort of like techno-mysticism, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, it's like a faith in technology. It's not the real deal.

So our Patreon subscribers might recognize that I did a reading a few months back of Kai Heron's excellent piece in Verso titled Forget Eco-Modernism. Oh, I think I'm in there. Yeah, yeah. He focused on the same two individuals that you focus on, Matthew Huber, which has actually he has been on the show. We talked to him about the Inflation Reduction Act for a documentary that we did. We didn't get into the critiques and stuff that you mentioned in the book or that Kai Heron brings up in that piece. And then also Lee Phillips is another individual. And I really appreciated your sort of Lenin-esque take down. It was very

entertaining passage. And yeah, I'm wondering if you could maybe just outline the eco-modernist position for us. There's so much in this chapter from, like we talked about techno-utopianism, nuclear, carbon capture and storage, the class misanalysis, all of this is packed into the section of the text.

So I'll let you kind of choose and pick which ones you want to talk about, I guess. But maybe if you could just talk a little bit about that chapter, the critiques that you have of this broadly, you know, eco modernist position. It's funny about this chapter. Some like there are some people who are like, buy my book only for this chapter. And then I think the vast majority of people are like, why is the longest chapter on this like weird shit I've never heard of? And like, I feel both those positions.

And also like, there was a way in which I was actually kind of hoping to avoid writing this chapter, but found it like unavoidable given the amount that these kinds of positions, it's not just these two cats, it's other folks, right? Like it does have a kind of like nice attractive quality for people who haven't maybe spent as much time in the weeds of the natural science and engineering literatures as I have to be like, oh, sweet. So these are some tech problems so we can just really just focus on a bunch of politics stuff. So where I start there, and I will also say that I really annoyed and this comes out, I think in the end of the book

that they get to have the phrase eco-modernism because I fucking love that phrase. And to me, modernism isn't what it is for these guys. For these guys, modernism is like just everything we have now, but more of it and forever. And this I also find very funny ideologically, because if there's one thing that is clear from both like current events and like surveys and all this kind of stuff, it's whatever people want. And I'm not saying they necessarily want what I want, but whatever it is they want, it's not more

of what we've got now. It's just not. It's just very funny to me. To me, modernism is like experimentation. I get to that later, but I do end up calling it the technomysicism. There's two different reasons why I think people are very attracted to this. I talk in there about Jeff Bezos too, because the most dominant form of this is found on the very wealthy, especially tech capital. So you're Elon Musk, you're Jeff Bezos too, because the most dominant form of this is found on the very wealthy, especially tech capital. Your Elon Musk's, your Jeff Bezos's, Bill Gates, I don't know, people like that who are like, this is technical stuff and we're going to solve it with some kind of magical space dust or we're going to do solar geoengineering or we're going to build nukes everywhere,

which by the way, as I pointed out in the book, has been tried. China really wanted to do that and they have way more interest in doing that than we do. And they also have the ability to build things very fast, very sophisticated, very difficult things very fast because of just the conditions there. And spoiler alert, they were unable to and instead built out this like massive, massive network of like ordinary renewables, windmills, mostly solar panels, but also windmills and a few other things. And it's also a little bit of a reaction to both the like tech solves everything, but also the like, we could just go back to like a non-tech world.

I'm sort of trying to break that weird sort of binary and be like, well, let's see which of these technologies actually work. And the reason I bring it, I call it climate leisencoism is I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with the Soviet agronomist Trofim Leisenko, but right, he was very famous for sort of being Stalin's pick for sort of, I don't know if the word is, how to translate this into English. Yeah, like sort of the grand czar, if you will. That's very funny for a Soviet thing to say. That is the terms we use for American government, you know, X czar and Y czar, but whatever. The sort of science czar for Stalin because his theories

happened to like be politically exigent for Stalinism as opposed to them being like scientifically like justified. And there was a lot of pushback in the Soviet Union against Lysenko. Unfortunately, you know, Stalin not known for, you know, being cool with them, a lot of pushback. Nonetheless, in my transposition of that concept into this, when I was looking at those two guys, and it's not just them, but they are really good examples for two different varieties of this, what you find is people being like, okay, are there

technologies that would allow me to go back to that 1955 deal, probably just in the global north. Now I know Matt pretends that he's like an internationalist of some kind, but his book is a nationalist book. I have no idea what Lee has to say about these things as far as I can tell. He doesn't have much to say about these things at all. But right, these the more or like represents for me the more like science sort of like just straight up science fantasy side. So he's just like none of this stuff is real planetary boundaries aren't real nukes can solve everything there are no limits on anything right I make this joke right if you've done seven impossible things before breakfast is from Douglas Adams, right?

You might as well go to Millie Wade, the restaurant at the end of the universe, right? It's a little bit too on the nose, but it is what it is. And in many ways, it's just kind of a nice rhetorical trick. I think of it as a sort of like sub-jijekian almost joke where it's like, oh, like what neoliberalism always preaches is austerity. So what I'm going to give you is abundance with no analysis of what kinds of abundance, like abundance of what, do these technologies work? Are they going to work on this time scale? Is this what anyone actually wants? Like none of that's really investigated. And in fact, as I point out,

if you sort of take away the jargon, like the Marxian jargon and stuff like this, there's no difference between the Jeff Bezos position and Lee Phil's position. They're the same person. Or they represent the same positions. And it is no accident that all these people end up working for similar think tanks and stuff, like the Breakthrough Institute and things like this.

That's not like an accident. Those guys basically are an industry lobby group. And if they can staple on a couple of social Democrats to make their program look a little bit more mainstream and broad-based and it has bought buy-in, great. But that's just whitewashing, right? That's not real. The map position I think is interesting because his first book was really good, actually. I think I say this in a footnote. He had an earlier book in 2011 called Lifeblood and it's actually like, it's pretty solid. I mean, there's things I would critique, but it actually weirdly has a lot in common with some of my approaches.

He talks about in that book how oil sort of helps shape a structure of feeling that has sort of is either slipping away, but is also simultaneously sticky. It's a very complex and interesting idea. And I think I wish he had pursued it instead. What he does in his book is he sort of tries to have his cake and eat it too constantly. So it's like, Oh, the working class is a super broad thing. So don't worry about it.

And then we'll proceed to be like, but really it's industrial workers at the point of production. And I'm like, okay, if that's really your jam, then you should be all about like talking about places like China, Indonesia, Vietnam, like places where people build things. But no, it becomes about like electrical workers in the United States. Great. And he does he choose the leftwing union. No, he doesn't. There's a, there is a left-wing and they're smaller, but electrical worker union in the United States, they're called UE. They do things that Matt doesn't like,

like work with nonprofits that are ecological nonprofits and things like this. He likes the burly bro man vision of, of what a worker is. And thus he takes both these like positions as outlined by sort of corporate unions that are working in tandem with their own industries. So these kind of like weird sort of sectoral representational lobbies, and it'll be like they're for a carbon capture. So we should help facilitate carbon capture. be like, they're for carbon capture. So we should help facilitate carbon capture. Now over here off to the other side of the story, anyone who is working on carbon capture, who is not working for industry is like this shit doesn't really work. And the best case scenario for it.

And now I'm quoting not like skeptics. I'm quoting probably the engineer most associated with supporting the development and deployment of carbon capture is like, oh, it doesn't matter right now. It only matters like a decade and only matters if we've already done the low hanging fruit, which is most of the energy transition and stuff. Because as I point out in the book, a lot of these things can seem really convenient and then you get tied up in the details. And I do get tied up in details. I think being honest and straightforward is very important. But at the end of the day, when people do like life cycle assessments, you got to remember everything we build costs something in terms of

ecological costs, in terms of social costs. And right now something like carbon capture, which sounds so neat, right? Like in a sort of abstract way, like, oh, I'm just going to shove like a nice little like, I don't know, the tech equivalent of a cigarette filter on the end of my smokestack, right? But it doesn't actually work. And actually, in the current calculus for life cycle assessments, it costs more, not just money, but like it actually, right, making it, deploying it, shipping it actually costs more carbon and more stuff that goes into it. And what do we currently do? Fun fact, right?

With most of our captured carbon, which is much lower rates than advertised, we use it for hydraulic fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction. It's a real winning, winning thing that we absolutely should do in the name of the working class. This is total bunk. And the other side of the sort of, this is again more on that sort of political versus the sort of scientific end of climate lysenkoism. Is this just sort of like comically simplistic view of how class is structured in modern societies? The difference between say an abstract sociological theory of class

and then a political class in motion, how is that working? How can that happen? And again, all this stuff ends up reproducing this kind of techno-mystical bullshit, not only about the technology, but then also about the history of class conflicts and class struggles. I mean, one of the funniest things to me in this whole thing is a lot of talk these days, Stephanie Abarca's a new book out,

Workers of the Earth Unite. And that's like a million times better of doing the story that I think someone like Hubert wants to tell, but she is not going to lie about the history, nor is she going to lie and say, oh, it's just legal strikes and voting that are the toolkit to get us there. This to me is such nonsense and so divorced from contemporary realities. I think everyone should be in a union. I wish that were the case. I do not think though, that if everyone were even, if everyone in a union,

that would automatically solve all of our problems. Like again, we can go back and talk about unions that, tact nationalist, this has been the problem. Marx himself was very vexed about this, right? The one hand he's like, these are working class self-organization. nationalist. And this has been the problem. Marx himself was very vexed about this rather than one hands like these are working class self organization on their hands like, yeah, but they can get pulled into all kinds of different directions depending on the prevailing winds of the day. So again, there's this kind of like, here's my one neat trick to solve things. And the last thing I would just

say about this stuff is it's really kind of like trying to shove a bunch of jeans back into a bottle, a bunch of square pegs into round holes. And it ends up with this leaning to me very obviously, for very obvious reasons, into this kind of like, well, maybe we need to have an alliance with certain right-wing tendencies. Maybe we need a revitalization of nationalism in the global core. Maybe we really need these things in order to sort of buy off people. And I mean, I hate to say it and other people can refute it if they like,

but some of the stuff I directly quote from these texts where they're like, workers need simple to understand messages and simple this, that, and the other. And that's just not the way I think about people. I think most people are actually quite intelligent and sophisticated. They have different literatures, different backgrounds, different cultures, different understandings of the world. But the idea that you need to sort of trick people into your program, that's not a left-wing ideal. And it will fail on the grounds of establishing solidarity,

because people are going to be like, yo, you fucking lied to me about that asshole. Like, we can't do exactly what the right does. And I think that's part of the story as well. I want to switch directions here for a second and talk about this project that you title, quote, the minor paradise of the sustainable niche. Can you tell us what you mean by that and maybe just talk about that and unpack it for us? Sure.

I should first of all give credit to the person who coined the phrase minor paradise, which is my colleague at Bisser, Rebecca Ariel Port. And I sort of borrowed it from, unfortunately, the work that she coined it in is not yet published. So that's one of the reasons I'm always trying to make sure she gets credit. But I sort of adapted it to this ecological thing with this sustainable niche. And it comes at the end of the chapter we were just talking about. And it's actually my favorite part of that chapter because there's nothing to do with

sort of trying to clear the air or wipe off the table these sort of fantasies. Instead, the idea there is Marx and others had really good reasons for being skeptical about utopianism, although they were less skeptical of utopian socialism than they were of other forms of socialism. And in fact, the classic Marx's own position on utopianism was like, you can't really design the future, right? As like a blueprint, that's not really possible or design even my present political project in all of its contours. It's going to unfold again with all these forces and changing subjectivities and whatnot, right? But Marx does say utopianism often points us to places in current society where reigning ideologies, reigning opinion, things like this, clearly don't make sense. And it points our eyes and our attention to places

where there are problems that we may not be aware of. And so the minor paradise section of the book, minor priorities of sustainable niche is sort of almost my boss relief, my negative space to that sort of technomysicism space where I'm like, look, this is not utopian planning. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for everyone. These things change from society to society. It's a global problem. It can only, only, and I can't stress this enough, work through international cooperation. And so like the stuff that's currently happening between the US and China, for example, to me is like the worst nightmare for climate.

Because if there is not partnership between these two largest economic powers in the world, we're fucking toast. And I will say it's also mostly on our side. The Chinese do not want this, especially because they're going to make a boatload of money off the other version. But nonetheless, in sort of negative relief of the sort of fake technologies, I'm like, well, instead of it being like, we've got to unfetter the powers of capitalism, like, Jesus Christ, like, I don't know who believes that today. Already, like a century ago, a lot of smart socialists in the global south and in the global north were like,

looks like we have technology enough to like feed people, house people. Like, aren't we there yet? It seems like we're there. And now we're like what we've like blown right past it. Right. So a lot of these guys will say things like let's unfetter everything. And my response is let's see what's actually been fettered. The forces of production have not been fettered.

What's been better are all these interesting, like historical and contemporary, either utopian ideals, aesthetic ideals, but also technological aesthetic planning, all kinds of interesting ideas from across the world that were never tried, mostly because they're not profitable and also because they might break open some of the geopolitical stranglehold of American imperial hegemony.

And to me, what you get there is really wild stuff. I mean, I'll just give you maybe one or two examples, one that's very contemporary and high tech and maybe one that's very older and low tech or what we call low tech. Right. So the like one of my favorite examples, and it actually took a long time. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't falling for like the techno babble bullshit was the like one of the biggest hard problems to solve in the climate space is air travel. There's not really a good solution for this. Almost everything that everyone tries fails. Every time you see maybe an ad that's like, oh, this is made with sustainable aviation fuel,

or this has been like offset by like we planted 100 birch trees. Like it's bullshit. It's all a lie. None of it's true. So like one of the funniest places in there is I find in these like edits in the IPCC reports, like a couple of guys being like, can't we just blimp some of this stuff? Like, wouldn't that be a nice solution? And there are actually people working on this.

It gets written out not because it's technically impossible and not even because it's like ultra anti-capitalist or something like that. It's just enough against the current model that people are like, this is unrealistic, not technologically unrealistic. It's unrealistic because it will slow down those processes. But also when you think about the kinds of social reforms you'd have to do to have slower travel, whether it be… and also you can find this in the news today, the return of

sailing ships, the return of limps, this shit is happening for some good reasons and for some bad reasons, whatever. Slowing things down hurts the bottom line, and thus that makes it unrealistic. As opposed to it being technologically impossible, we know how to do this stuff technologically. So that's one really key space. And also like that kind of like slow interesting travel and those kinds of objects like to me are this kind of stuff you see people get real excited about. They're like, oh my God, what would that mean if I actually had enough time and could experience things in this

way? That more than like we're going to colonize Mars seems to get people really excited and interested in sustainable solutions to real problems that also address their own unsustainable lives. And I'm very clear about this in the book. I don't think we're getting communism tomorrow. I wish we were. Trust me, I do. But this version of sort of eco-socialism or of heavily managed capitalism, I'm not saying we're going to obliterate all private property tomorrow either, right?

It doesn't seem like it's going to happen. But there are these paths to sort of making people's lives more enjoyable and more sustainable for themselves, not just for the world around them. And the more low tech examples that I use, both there and in the end of the book, are things like evaporative cooling systems as they were developed in Iran and in India and in Spain and places like this, or the Masjid al-Rubayya, these beautiful windows you have in places like Sana'a Yemen, which were once for aristocrats. But we could all have this stuff. And what do they do? They're just enough. There's really beautiful ornate windows. They let just enough air in to make those wind currents cool off the house

and just enough light in so that it's bright and enjoyable, but it doesn't get too hot. These are also technologies in the same way that the climate sciences have started to turn, especially in the agricultural space, to what they call indigenous knowledge, or what I just call accreted technological knowledge. It turns out, for example, that like over irrigation and petro farming, not very sustainable. But these like practices of like terrace farming, for example, and you've mentioned Palestine before. So Palestine is a great example, right? The traditional farming methods, the olive groves, the terrace farming, etc, etc, are very

sustainable. irrigating the shit to grow oranges in a desert, not very sustainable. Here's one of the places where the natural scientific literature is a little bit late to the game. And it's not something like magic about being a brown person, a black person, an indigenous person, whatever. It's nothing magic about it. It's just like, oh, these are people who've had to live in an arid climate for a long time, or a very hot climate for a long time, and grow food. Let's see what they figured out to do that. And we have these things at our fingertips, and I cite a lot of examples in the book

that show that when they've been tried, they've often been very successful, and not only in this kind of, again, in the ecological way, but for example, we use this case study from Cuba in the period immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union where they were forced to do all this agroecology and agroforestry for practical reasons. And it ended up with lowering labor hours, which was the least expected outcome, because everyone assumes, oh my God, if we're going back into agriculture, we're going to have to actually bump up labor hours. But the systems were so well-designed,

the cooperation between the farmers and the technicians and the scientists and so on were so integrated with knowledge going back and forth, planning going back and forth, labor going back and forth, that in fact, the projects were also socially salutary in that sense of giving people more temporal luxury, more freedom of time. As we wrap up the conversation, I just have a couple more questions for you. I'm going to start with a brief quote from the book and then ask you sort of a follow-up on that. So you write in the closing pages, quote,

exhaustion may be the connective tissue between existing ecological and social upheavals across the world. Exhaustion can be the foundation for externalizing what are still too often individualized experiences of the relentlessness of the extractive circuit for uniting and radicalizing. Exhaustion can be more than a prism through which to view debates regarding social and ecological reproduction. It can be a potent point of view and starting position for the politics of left-wing climate realism." So you do a great job in the book, of course, and we've also spoken about this as sort of exhaustion, like you say, being this connective tissue, what I

think of sort of, you know, is like the tissue that connects like a revolutionary class of our time, maybe if you want to think about it that way. I'm wondering, so we've identified the political subject, you can feel free to talk about that in more if you'd like to fill in any of the gaps that I just spoke about. But also, the next question, and one of the most important ones, I think, and interesting ones to me, is what's your vision for a political strategy?

So we have the revolutionary class. What next? So I mean, I wish we had the revolutionary class. So I theorize. Theoretically. Yeah. And look, I've got had the revolution in class. So I theorize theoretically. Yeah. And like, look, I've got my QT terminology here too, right? I've got a bunch of terms I make, you know, I coined for this book, right?

Right when climate realism, extractive circuit, climate, less than realism, this idea of the exhausted. I don't necessarily think that like if this political formation solidified, right? Crystal, I think I use the word crystallize in the book, that necessarily means everyone chooses a J's terms. I don't give a fuck. If people raise a flag and call themselves the aggrositive, it doesn't bother me at all.

But rather, the quote you just read from me, thanks, what that's trying to point out is, look, this is a common ground on which we can talk between what are often existing and quite broad-based social movements in the global South and more nascent formations in the global North. This is a shared ground. This is a place to start those kinds of conversations, which can be very quid pro quo. I talked about this with that sort of like Congo example earlier,

where it sucks for, I don't know, Apple and Samsung and Google if Congo gets greater sovereignty and control over its resources. But it kind of might rule in a very quid pro quo way for people who are dealing with the other side, whether it be software, whether it be delivery, whether it be whatever in the global north, to have those firms be facing a lot of geopolitical headwinds like that. That quid pro quo can begin with, look, we share this common ground. We share these common enemies when climate realism When climate realism, right? We share these things. And it's my view that from there,

you could have a greater subjectivity emerge. Now, the question that you asked is about strategy. And I have to say the strategy part of this book is quite long and is quite bleak. And in fact, feels under bleak a year later than I wrote it now at this point, right? Because I had to file this in 2023, it came out in 2024 and now it feels even bleaker. Because yeah, I think even though I don't think we're going to have a full revolution, yada, yada, yada, also everyone should know at this point that any incrementalist program is fail.

And that's not actually me, Ajay, radical talking. That is the kind of material that actually blew my mind when I first started reading climate science papers. And they would be like, incrementalism is not working. And they would be very cautious and be like, we can't say what will work because that seems like that's for people who do politics and society and stuff like that. But I'm telling you right now, this incremental shit is not working in terms of bending any

of these curves or whatever. The strategy that I try to come up with that's in between is something I call civil war, which can sound very extreme. I have a couple of reasons why I do this. One is that in terms of looking for historical comparison for climate mitigation and adaptation, when we're looking at the costs, right? How much wealth gets destroyed,

how much wealth gets redistributed, the only thing that remotely approximates it in human history is the end of the transatlantic slave trade and then the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. And anyone who's familiar with that, that is by the way up till now, at least in the modern period, I don't know in the pre-modern period, the largest destruction and transfer of wealth in human history. So we need to be thinking at that scale for climate. But I also want to clarify that when I say civil war,

the model, in fact, the quintessential example I use, and it's tough because Bolivia is now going through even more strife, not more strife than it was then, but different kinds of strife, was the sort of civil war in their own terms that MAS and its allies had to fight against the coup government. And they were a very explicitly eco-party, eco-socialists sort of, and they're a new style party and that's complicated if you're interested in that, read the book. But that did involve everything from, I think, what people would think of as respectable normal politics in our society. So court cases, running elections, disputing elections, trying to reach out to treaty organizations, like all this kind of very prosaic, you know, this is normal politics strikes that too.

Like, so maybe a little more aggressive there. But then straight up, they did in fact blockade shit, set shit on fire and even shoot people. Not as many as their opposition did and not in like American civil war, God forbid style, like pitch battles. They even had to like, at one point they like released a press release being like, look, some people are almost innocent people are almost certainly going to die in this process of like blockading the Capitol because right ambulances won't get through things like this. And in fact, the fascist coup government did try to take them to international court on that

particular issue. And they issued an apology before the fact. So I think that's a very realistic understanding. This is also where one of those isomorphisms with Fanon and with anti-colonial movements I think is so powerful. But the other side of that isomorphism with Fanon and with anti-colonial movements I think is so powerful. But the other side of that isomorphism is particularly with someone like Fanon is it's not just about the prosaic politics. It's not just about the radical wing or what's often called in the literature, radical flank politics, which then make the nice middle of the road radicals seem much more attractive and all this kind of stuff, which does actually work, by the way, historically. It's also a lot of this stuff that people often

think about in terms of climate, but mostly in terms of outcomes. And I'd rather they also thought about it as part of the movements, which is things like care work and how to deal with the fallout of abrasive contentious politics. People get hurt and traumatized. I know this may be now make me sound like a crazy person or like I'm like about to give you some weird like trauma woo woo lecture, but no, no, no, no, no. Just read the histories of these kinds of wars and movements and things that happened in the past. People get broken, people get burned out, people get PTSD, people get really difficult problems. So we also need to be thinking. And then I look at a bunch of movements and lo and behold, a lot of them do this, right? Where they

do have spaces for recuperation, where they do have spaces for treatment, for mutual aid, for sharing and like, you know, libraries, all this kinds of stuff. There's all this talk right now about institutions. I can say as someone who worked over a decade of my life trying to make one, yes, making these kinds of spaces for people is vital and is incredibly important and is a significant part of every one of these radical histories. And so it's not just that I am trying to break, that I am trying to break, and I am trying to break, a sort of false, and I show this in the notes if anyone cares,

completely false narrative about nonviolence and how it always works and yada yada yada. It's basically a thesis made up in the State Department for obvious reasons. But it's not just about just proving that, it's also about getting people to think seriously like that should like the prosaic, the incredibly radical, including violence, and also the sort of social reproductive and care aspect of things, ideally sort of disconnected from their gendering and their racialization must be also part of these political

movements and they tend to be part of movements that are successful. So that's the strategy. That's part of the strategy part. But it's also like with every passing moment and every passing political disaster, it just becomes more and more intense. And so if that stuff frightens you, as some of my readers, it does. Some of the people who read my book and really liked it

were like, whoa, that's pretty far, dude. And I'm like, yeah. So if you don't want it to be even worse, we better get started right now. And I think that might actually lead into some of the temporal stuff I know you were thinking as well Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I agree. Also. I think that section was really interesting I could see how it would be difficult for certain people

I think for me it wasn't very difficult and it actually did make a lot of sense because I've been thinking a lot and we've actually had some conversations on the show about non-violence versus violence and I don't want to get too deeply into that anymore than you already did because, again, people can check out the book. It's a really, really interesting discussion. You can check out our episode with Brett O'Shea actually on revolutionary Buddhism if you want to see maybe some of that stuff. But yes, I think, as you said, I do want to end on this question, this idea rather that you bring up at the end of the book, this idea of the long now. And it's

especially interesting to me because we just did an episode really thinking about temporality on this idea of like how to be a good ancestor. And the author that we spoke to also brought up the radical fringe theory that you just brought up. So there was some interesting overlaps. But yeah, so maybe just to close out, tell us about the idea of the long now, what it means and what it might look like. So the whole book has a sort of dramaturgical shape, right?

It's like your initial dilemma and then your antagonist, right, right, in climate realism, then your sort of stage setting, right, is your world building is the extractive circuit. And then we have our sort of like central conflict in both chapters three and four, and then we got our protagonist, the exhausted, and then, you know, hopefully they get, you know, what they want, right? The sustainable niche, the minor paradise. The fifth chapter I say is the denouement in the prologue. It's also like the thing I often say is for the theory heads, is where I get most heavily theoretical, I think, in the whole text. And part of the argument there is something that I think applies outside the climate frame, but then most of it is about the climate frame. So the part that's outside the climate frame is simply looking to a long tradition of thinking, I use Benjamin as my main touch point, but there are many other figures I also look at, who have always been suspicious of this idea that we only have pasts and futures, right? And right. We're always thinking about the future.

And this is particularly the case in climate stuff, right? Oh my God. Won't we think of what's going to happen to our children? Well, I hate to break it to people, but there are brush fires in New York city right now. Prospect park, right? How's it part and then upper Manhattan yesterday. I saw that on the news. The new normal, not so great. I mean, and that's minor,

the stuff happening here is minor. What just happened with two super storm hurricanes in a row, like this stuff is not going away. And now I'm just talking about stuff that's hitting the US, let alone shit that's happening elsewhere. I mean, there are whole countries who are already planning their own demise. Many of these smaller island states in the Pacific are like, okay, that's it, game's over. Their bargaining chip now is not like for climate investment. It's

like, who's going to take our population? Right? Like some of that stuff is like really, really intense. So we are talking about the present. I'll say what I say to my students actually, as opposed to thinking about the book. Listen to any political speech ever, and you'll always get some version of left or right Hegelianism. You'll get like, yeah, where people, again, will have this fetish of the child or the grandchildren or something like that. And we're going to do X, Y, and Z to save them. So a right wing version of this would maybe be right, but it's still like a weird, it has a weird like progress regress thing. The right versus might be like, and thus we will defend the traditional family

and make sure that the world, the future is safe for these, these precious, precious, not yet existing children. I'm very much more interested in the actually existing people than in theoretical people who don't yet exist, but whatever. And then the left-wing version, I'm sorry to say the best statement of this is Martin Luther King, who I otherwise really respect because he's a great guy. But like the arc of history is long and it bends toward justice, which then of course Obama borrowed for his campaigns. No, no, that's just Christian providentialism. I'm sorry, that's just theology. It doesn't actually have any meaning in the real world.

Whatever justice one gets is what you can wreak out of conditions. And so, especially in the climate space, there is often a consensus or just an assumption that we are talking about a future oriented problem and that there's too much quote unquote like short term thinking as opposed to long term thinking. And that's without even getting into like long termism and effective altruism and these

new cults of the right that are just bizarre. As opposed to just dealing with the fact that climate is a present tense problem, climate mitigation, adaptation, the political problems are a present tense problem, and the possibilities for these quasi-utopian respites, I call the lateral steps, which is a, I borrowed that phrase from Lauren Berlant, the late Lauren Berlant, right? This sort of lateral project is much more exciting and also is what we need to be thinking about. It's funny because we just, again, I hate to use election examples, but we just had this big election in the US, obviously, and thus you already have people talking about like primaries and elections in 28 and 32. And it's someone who's

like climate-pilled, I guess. I don't know if that's a term, maybe I just made it up. Like, it's real hard for me to think about like, what the electoral landscape looks like towards the end of the 2020s or the beginning of the 2030s, where it would not be a radical proposition, for example, to say like, large swaths of like very important parts of the United States, say Florida, California, et cetera, stuff like that have been rendered partially or totally fucked, right? Where huge portions of the population, I'm like, this is where the rubber hits the road on how climate change changes politics, which again is one of the issues that I set out to write about. And I guess the last thing to say there is this also ties into that sort of minor paradise issues that if we stop just trying to invent, you mentioned before Fisher, right? And I love Fisher and the privatization of stress. And when

I talk about these kinds of externalizing exhaustion, I'm thinking both with Fennan but also with Fisher, right? This like, how like these kinds of stress and stressors, whether we're talking about them, and here is my adaptation, right? In psychological or ecological terms, can be externalized as opposed to like, oh, it's my fault. Similarly, when we look at the present as the long now, not just this split second moment that we're in, but basically this rough time period of mitigation and adaptation, not exactly, but roughly, right? We can see different and more exciting political projects than what are maybe our fantasies of what exciting political projects are. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary,

executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and core faculty member specializing in social and political theory, and author of The Exhausted of the Earth, Politics in a Burning World, published by Repeater Books. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Mount Erie for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign

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