 And the word cheap for us is precisely a way of describing how capitalism avoids paying its bills. When you look at the food system, you can see that it is organized so that the urban proletariat, the working class in cities in particular, get access to cheap food as a tool of control. Well, it shouldn't be the Anthropocene. This should be the Capitalocene. And if we call it the Capitalocene, then actually you're in a much better place because it's not all humans who are part of the problem here. There are indigenous civilizations that would never think of doing something like this. And indigenous people are humans, and so it's wrong to say, well, this is Anthropocene because here are some humans who are not doing that. It's the capitalist system that's driving this, and therefore that's called it the Capitalocene because it's a much more accurate word. I'm interested in the idea of the low-carbon economy that is made possible by regimes of care that are radically egalitarian. And if there is a generalization of that idea, I'm all for it. But I also think that, again, you can't have this generalization without remembering how we got here. Otherwise, we fall back into this idea of the capitalist amnesia. And that's what worries me about degrowth. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our societies, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and today we're going to try to unmask the true cost of cheapness in our societies. Over the last decades or even centuries, a small part of the planet has been enjoying more and more cheap stuff. From sugar to coffee to energy, everything seems to get cheaper. However, to keep these prices low, something has to give. Nature, care, labor and even lives are some of the elements capitalism needed to make cheap in order to perpetuate itself. However, what happens when we run out of things, land and people to make cheap? To guide us through this systemic forces of this hyper-exploitation and propose a path out of it, I have the immense pleasure to talk with Raj Patel. Raj is an award-winning author, filmmaker and academic. He is a research professor at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and he is the author of Stuff and Starve. I realize I forgot to bring the book, but he's also the co-author of Jason Moore of the book, A History of the Word in Seven Cheap Things. And just before we start, I would like to thank Andreas from the EEV, the European Environmental Bureau, which is the largest network of environmental citizens organizations, and they are also the co-organizer of the Beyond Growth Conference, which this talk is framed within. So with all that out of the way, welcome Raj to the podcast. Thanks so much, Aristides. It's good to meet you. I'm very excited. I'll try to make interesting questions because I'm so excited. I might miss the beat, but before we dive in into word ecology, to cheapness, to structural relationships between society and nature, I want to ask you about your journey. How did you arrive into focusing on these topics, going from economics to sociology to activism? Was there a turning point, or was it a gradual process of things that ticked and made you be interested in all of this? It was a bit of both, Aristides. So initially I came to understand the inequities of poverty in the food system when I was five, and I was in India in the land of my ancestors, and there was a young girl begging at a traffic light, and it was monsoon, and I was inside a car with my parents, and this girl was sort of keening against the door with a little infant knocking in the window saying, look, we're hungry, we're poor, give us something. And I looked up at her and I just lost my mind. I got very, very upset. And eventually my parents cracked down the window and posted some money outside and then off we drove. But then after that, in England, I started renting out my toys in school for the money to give to charity. And since that moment, I've been just trying to figure out what is the best way to stop that feeling. And so I was an activist in my teens, and in Thatcher's Britain, that was a real initiation into really what class struggle was, but also what race was. And I think that that's something that, it was very interesting to be both on the inside of a deep loathing of Thatcher, but also on the outside of not recognizing myself in many of the movements whose meeting I was sort of sideling into. But I also was a technocrat when I was a teen, and I thought, look, maybe the right policy hadn't been written or the right way of understanding the system of the world hadn't been done. So I thought, well... You can change the system from within somehow. All I needed was the tools. And so initially I thought mathematics was the way to go and then economics. And since then, with more exposure to more of the social movements that had interesting questions to ask about, well, if technocracy is so good, why hasn't it been working? And does it matter that people have to agree to something? And increasingly the answer, well, yes, this is how hegemony works. You need a movement to be able to secure power. You can't just write an equation and then go off to the beach. And that understanding that, in fact, the work of change happens through social movements has meant that I'm spending more and more time working with peasant movements, with movements of people who live in shacks, for example. And that kind of work is meant that I moved through UN organizations and NGOs, but now spend my time both working with social movements, but also on the outside trying to explain to people how they might join, why they must join, and how it is that the various kinds of lies that I once believed need to be put in a coffin once and for all. And you mentioned, so food and social injustice are kind of the two corpillars that you're focused, I think, throughout your career, right? That's right, yes. Why so? I mean, you said, you know, this deep memory that you have as a kid, right? So perhaps this kind of... Well, I mean, initially I wanted to do cities like you. I was very interested in the metabolism of cities. And it happened through a couple of accidents that I found myself spending more and more time with social movements. So I was in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protests. I was there because I was working with an organization called SEATINI, which was the Southern and East African Trade Informations and Negotiations Initiative. But essentially what we were doing was working with civil servants in the Southern and East African region to help them understand that they didn't have to sell out their countries when they were at the World Trade Organization, for instance. And it's very tempting to do that because, you know, the civil services in these countries are very under-resourced and they often bombarded with all these proposals from the European Union or from the United States through the World Trade Organization. And a lot of it didn't make any sense and so they didn't realize what was at stake by agreeing to intellectual property rights provisions or, you know, the agreement on agriculture. And what we... But you had to be in the inside and know the lingo. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This was a way of me committing class suicide, right? I mean, I'd spent a lot of time learning this lingo and realizing that if I was going to deploy this language within the organization, I would be engaging in various kinds of compromise and I didn't have a constituency to be able to betray. And that, you know, those realizations meant, well, at least I can do something with this language. I can teach other people about it. So that's exactly right, Aristide. It is a facility with this insider language that then I was able to sort of stand on the outside. So anyway, I was in Seattle in 1999 as part of the Zimbabwean Trade Delegation. But I was also working with the... what was then, indie media, this independent media organization that was one of the first to be able to push the idea of Web 2.0 where anyone could publish anything. And in 1999 that was a very new and exciting thing. So I was writing articles and sort of getting the word out about what was happening in Seattle. And on the streets, you know, I was wearing black, a very professional looking black, but it was black. And that's important because you could go inside and look, you know, like you were hip, but go outside and look like you were part of the protest. And I was going inside and outside, very interested in what movements like La Via Campesina were doing. So although I wasn't really specifically focusing on food, it looked like the movements that had the most interesting things to say about globalization in general and about the sort of process of capitalist extraction were the ones who are engaged in food and agriculture and fisheries as well. So those movements are the ones that I spent more and more time with. And then by accident I got a job at an organization called Food First. So after I finished my doctoral work, I was a policy analyst at an organization that worked with some more social movements and in particular worked with La Via Campesina. So that was how it is that I really got steered towards the food world. It wasn't fully intentional. It was, you know, partly accident and partly, you know, I knew some of the language that was useful in translating this very obscure organization to a broader audience. Yeah, and real concrete challenges as well. So yesterday in your panel this term and this process of cheapness was brought up a number of times by yourself but not only by yourself but many of your co-panelists. And I think it is a lens that enables us to look at the world, to understand the world. It enables us to see a number of webs, be them social, be them economic, be them natural, and they're all intermingled somehow. And I think you and your co-author propose a nice story to understand, to re-understand the world. Let's say in this history of 500 years, right? I think it's important to perhaps explain why cheap, what is so important about the cheap, the adjective cheap in all of this, what led you to think you needed this concept? How was the discussion? What was the story back there? So I was very much focused on the idea of cheap food and when you look at the food system you can see that it is organized so that the urban proletariat, the working class in cities in particular, get access to cheap food as a tool of control. And this isn't a particularly capitalist phenomenon, you can read about it in ancient China, you can read about it in the Roman Empire. So it's not new that ruling classes have anxieties about what poor people will do if they're not hungry. But the way that capitalism has structured relationships between rural and urban spaces and even encourages us to think about those places using these words is very novel. And that's something that my first book, Stuffed and Starved, was very interesting and I was looking really at the supply chain from field to plate. But Jason was working not just on cheap food but also a broader context of how cheap, he was looking at cheap nature, cheap food, cheap energy and I'm blanking on the fourth one for the moment. Oh, cheap work of course, cheap labor. Now these ideas, he came to the University of Texas, we met, we saw each other over a conference room our eyes locked and we became good friends and we started exploring some of these ideas of cheapness and the word cheap for us is precisely a way of describing how capitalism avoids paying its bills. Jason's ideas in some of his previous work was really sort of pointing to the idea that the way capitalism has structured has always been about providing, generating processes of exploitation and extraction that allow the accumulation of resources and then the extraction of profit through cycles of exchange, of capitalist exchange, that allow the accumulation of profit. Now what we did is essentially marry all those ideas together and then recognize that there are a few really missing ideas in that process and one that we're very much agreed on is the idea of cheap care. You can't have a capitalist system without the provision of cheap care which is usually coded under patriarchy as women's work. Now that work is taken for granted not just by capitalism but often absent the world of work particularly of Silvia Federici even by certain kinds of Marxists and Maria Mies also has incredible work here that we drew on to be able to build that chapter and then there were a couple of other things that were quite important for us. We were interested in the idea of cheapness when it came to money because money itself became a sort of, to use Polanist terms, a sort of fictitious commodity and we were interested also in the racial implications of this and so we looked at the book at cheap lives the way that some people's lives are worth less than others. Now some might argue that that's really what cheap nature means that to be part of nature is to be considered indigenous or a colonized person or a woman or whatever it is but there's something specific about this moment in capitalist history that cheap lives, being able to identify here's the human surplus in particular in Europe at the moment, it's migrants that these people are disposable in a way that other people are not and it points to the way that states operate to cheapen those lives even if the cheapening of those lives is actually quite expensive. So I want to, there is some elements into that which I found fantastic and I think we need to remind them that these seven cheap things, cheap nature we're going to discuss, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy and cheap lives and you mentioned, well, capitalism avoids paying its bills but also within the book you mentioned that cheapness is the strategy, the set of strategies to manage relationships between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism crisis and I think that you unpack a number of terms here so it's strategies, so it's not by accident none of this is by accident, right? Second, it's between capitalism and the web of life because you mentioned web of life instead of nature instead of this fungible arbitrary thing and then lastly you also mentioned fixing capitalism crisis which is kind of a perpetuating vicious circle sometimes and so I'm wondering how, what is this, where are some of these strategies to make things cheap? Well, I mean, let's take the most recent one where in the United States for instance we had Silicon Valley bank collapse and then a number of others in, you know, one by one by one these undercapitalized, medium-sized banks what happened in these relationships was a banking crisis that threatened to sprawl through the international financial system now this banking crisis was predictable and there was even a certain degree of regulation that might have prevented it that was then taken away by the Trump administration but even the regulation that did exist was poorly implemented and you would expect that if it were true that the government is really the executive arm of the bourgeoisie you would expect this regulation to be badly implemented and so it came to pass that there was a banking crisis what did the state do? Even with interest rates at a very high level and you can understand interest rates as the cheapness of money the government found billions of dollars to be able to recapitalize these bank or secure the loans or the deposits of the depositors in this bank and I thought that's an example of how capitalism necessarily generates crisis because banks, bourgeoisie, government this is a normal predictable part of the banking world but it's also predictable that then the government will step in and find cheap money and that process of a crisis that comes from the natural workings of capitalist enterprise then is generated that comes to a head and there are strategies that are developed to be able to fix those crises and again we're using the idea of the fix that understands a temporary patch on the crisis of capitalism but then the fix will come from elsewhere one of the ideas that's central in our book is the idea of the frontier one of the early examples of the frontier is the process of exploration of the discovery of the new world and these are ways of finding new frontiers with new resources new zones by the application of labour and the extraction and accumulation of resources you can find ways of fixing a crisis that's happening elsewhere in the capitalist system so whether it's in the world of banking or whether it's Elon Musk wanting to colonize Mars there are plenty of zones in which we can see these frontiers but you don't have to go to Mars to find these frontiers you can also just find them in the Amazon you can find them in the ways that our daily lives are becoming increasingly zones of extraction you can see it in an Uber so all of these are new and interesting frontiers that again capitalists have found to be able to fix crises that propagate elsewhere within the capitalist system I love this element of frontiers indeed because they also help us understand that it's just an exportation or externalization of the problem until we have no more and we're at this place where we have no more so you have a couple of examples which take all of these cheap strategies together I think perhaps the most striking one is Madeira how it went from reconfiguration within the web of life it started by having let's say it suffered colonialism it suffered exploitation it suffered different ways of extraction going from woods to wheat to sugar to people so perhaps I think the value also of this book is to situate it in examples because it can be overwhelming all of these elements can be understood but then how do we see them? could you perhaps elaborate on the example of Madeira a bit with these seven cheap things and what do they mean? sure, so the island of Madeira was one of the earliest in the archipelago of Portuguese colonialism and initially it was an Isla do Madeira I wish I could pronounce Portuguese better than I can but it means the island of wood, right? it's an island filled with trees and initially the trees were used for shipbuilding then once the trees had been cleared it was used a little bit for wheat growing but then the Portuguese brought hydrological engineers from Egypt who were among the most sophisticated engineers of waterways on the planet they created these systems of irrigation that allowed the production of one of the world's most expensive crops which at that time was sugar and through the application of capital from Genoa and so you have a lot of trade happening between Madeira and Genoa in fact what one of the captains of the ships that goes backwards and forwards is Christopher Columbus he was charged in court with losing some property on that ship on one of his journeys and that's how we know that he was on his way back and forth from Madeira his uncle was the governor of Madeira and so you've got loads of connections with Columbus Columbus is another figure we can get to but so on Madeira now the wood gets turned not into construction material but into fuel and that fuel is used to be able to distill sugarcane into these cones of sugar that then were traded in Europe but it doesn't happen by itself, you need labor and the labor that was brought on was enslaved people from other Portuguese colonies and from the Crusades and their labor was applied to this island the capital came in, they were disciplined in ways that their lives were already regarded as cheap and they were through this sort of process it took about 75 years for the island to be turned from this island of wood into an island that was entirely denuded of wood and so it was about 75 year cycle in which the work on the island relied on cheap care relied on cheap nature, the wood was cheap fuel and the food that the people on the island were given also had been managed in a way to be able to keep them alive though not allow them to thrive in any way and all of us, you have this sort of full system of the seven cheap things through which a vast amount of resources are extracted to Europe and then you have this husk of an island that remains a frontier and I think that this is the interesting thing about frontiers even when they're exhausted there is ample opportunity to reinvent and this is where the techno-futurists come in and say they've always been capitalist crisis, they've always been someone smart enough to figure it out and it's true, Madeira stops being an island where there is sugar production and then becomes a way station for the transatlantic slave trade and now you can go to Madeira and Europeans get to go there on holiday and visit all the places where the sugar was made and look at all the graveyards where all the enslaved people were buried, now it's a tourism destination which is the new reconstructed version of Madeira but every time there is this process of reinvention that again, capitalists like to celebrate well yes, there's been a crisis but look at this new technology, tourism it's going to turn everything around and I think that points to a certain kind of psychology of amnesia where that you need under capitalism to be able to say well, don't worry about that, we're awfully sorry, this island is called the island of wood there's not many trees here yet but don't ask awkward questions about why we live in a place called Oakland whether or not oak trees or why it is that we're in the island of wood with no trees let's instead worry about how are we going to develop this tourism industry and this process of constant amnesia but also saying well actually the real problem is we don't have enough investment or tax breaks for the hotel industry that's our problem right now these processes of constant reinvention is the creative destruction of capital what one doesn't want to underestimate how powerful that is but one also wants to say well this power comes from the deep anxiety that without these fixes the system itself will fall apart and that's why the fixes are central to the system 100% and then I think over there we also had stories before like the Black Death even before the capitalist system there was already some or pre-capitalist system these fixes existed in empires, existed in previous cities but also they exist today I think Madero is so nice because it's a contained example that has as you say in 70 years everything has been transformed most recently it's I think a bit harder to elucidate these seven elements all together in one place and perhaps it's through products or through supply chains or through specific elements that we can see them once again I think one of your favorite example are nuggets or chickens which also encapsulate all of the seven elements in one poor animal that wasn't even made to exist one of the most capitalist objects we argue is the chicken nugget and we went for this example because we were really trying to take an aim at people who use the term Anthropocene now listeners will have heard of the idea of the Anthropocene as this moment in geological history that humans have altered the planet irrevocably and if you look in the fossil record and the stratigraphic record what are the signatures of the Anthropocene well it's plastic for example by 2050 there'll be more plastic in the sea than harvestable fish there are traces again in the fossil record of our atmospheric nuclear weapons tests but one of the signatures of what some people are calling the Anthropocene is chicken bones because the chicken is the world's most popular bird there are 12 billion chickens alive now but not for long there's 90 days from egg to nugget and every year we go through 50 billion chickens and that number is only going up so trillions of chicken bones already in the fossil record and that's a sign that it's not a natural part of being human that there should be so many chicken bones there's some process that makes it so that if there's any civilization after that they'll find all these chicken bones and they'll be like well what generated it right and the story isn't about humans being humans because before capitalism humans weren't relying on chickens that much this is a bird that comes from East Asia there's domesticated, certainly it spreads around the world but it's not cultivated in the sort of volume that you see today so the fact that you can take the chicken and do with it what you want that's an example of cheap nature but you need workers to take this chicken and turn it into a nugget and the cheap work here I think is very interesting we found a story alas after we'd finished the book of some chicken executives in Oklahoma in the United States they realized that it's very expensive to have workers work on the chicken plant particularly at night working on a chicken plant is always underpaid these businesses in America had used prison labor that were paid nothing or 25 cents an hour something very small but even that was too much and so what these executives did was set up something called Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery and it's a really clever organization it's about helping people who are suffering the opioid epidemic which is another capitalist crisis there's not even time to get into that but so here are people who are in withdrawal from opioids they could either be sent to jail or they can be sent to this place Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery and by day they pray to the good Lord Jesus Christ and then at night they are sent to work as part of their rehabilitation on the chicken production line where they don't have to be insured they lose a finger they'll suffer repetitive strain injury but this is part of their penance for having become Addicts and we thought this is a really interesting mirroring of the first colonial encounters in the New World where indigenous people were also enslaved and made it to work for most of the week and then on Sunday they used to pray to Jesus here the time coding is slightly different but the object is exactly the same that you're using people who are incarcerated literally to be able to work for you for free and so there's an example of cheap work of course people's bodies get broken by this process but when they get spat out of the Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery it's up to communities usually to look after the people who are disabled that's the idea of cheap care excuse me the chickens themselves are sort of hyper processed and turned into food that is used that is fed to other people cheaply in order to be able to manage the budgets of the working class cheap food is certainly part of the dividend in the United States all of this requires fossil fuel butane to run the hen houses or fossil fuels to oil the machinery and the transports and the logistics of the food industry to be able to provide the feed all of this so again cheap food, cheap energy and now we're moving into cheap money you need cheap money to be able to sell these products in the United States you can buy chicken nuggets or perhaps a KFC used to be Kentucky Fried Chicken is a KFC here as well but if those are small businesses then you can get a concessional loan from the federal government up to two million dollars and again cheap money there and then of course if you look at who it is that's in the production plants whose work is exploited all the way along these are workers who are usually people of color and disproportionately women again the lives of these people and often immigrants the lives of these people don't matter as much as the the property is or even indeed the consumers so all the way seven cheap things from this chicken all the way to the nugget and that's why we wanted to say well it shouldn't be the Anthropocene this should be the Capitalocene and if we call it the Capitalocene then actually you're in a much better place because it's not all humans who are part of the problem here but there are indigenous civilizations that would never think of doing something like this indigenous people are humans and so it's wrong to say well this is Anthropocene because here are some humans who are not doing that it's the capitalist system that's driving this and therefore let's call it the Capitalocene because it's a much more accurate word Yes and I think we can go on with a number of different of such examples which I think enable us to anchor it once again I mean there are people I mean the workers have to diapers to work all day all night as you mentioned in order to do so I mean when we talk about conditions of labor in the US this is I mean you know we've reached the peak of of dishonesty and not being able to well to feel like a human being anymore so it drops many people as well lives well or dignity at least so we mentioned about the frontiers that's something that strikes me as a as a powerful concept that is worrisome as well because we we have reached many limits we have reached many frontiers do we I mean how does capitalism run when there is no more frontiers or what happens when we run out because I feel that do we double down on people that were exploited once this triple exploitation of people in climate change or what happens there well there are a couple of things to look at one of the ways we situate the capitalist moment is by looking at pre-capitalist history and you know capitalism emerges from a crisis emerges from a crisis in Europe that is about climate change like death and it's about the economics of food production before capitalism feudalism worked by applying more and more labour feudal labour serfs to particular bits of land and because the weather was very cooperative in this moment it was possible to have a certain amount of exploitation of the land that was essentially through the management practices of commoning and of agricultural practices in Europe that recognized that you needed to nonetheless save soil you couldn't just pull resources out of it all the time but the metabolism of the soil itself was respected those systems were robust but when the black death swept through Europe all of a sudden serfs peasants realized that they had the upper hand in negotiating a different kind of post feudal moment and there was an explosion of different kinds of possibility and I think this often gets forgotten in the transition from feudalism to capitalism it seems like they tried one thing then they moved to another but in fact the end of an era is a time of an explosion of lots of different ideas and so you see a number of things happening in the transition from feudalism to capitalism like peasant riots for example peasant rebellions, claims on the forest charters of the forest for example that try to expand a really quite communist idea of how the world should be and how it is that we should hold the world in common and I think that that's rather interesting and Jason's new work is precisely looking at the history of these pre-capitalist communist ideas and that's the possibility here that in fact as we head towards crisis there will be lots of alternatives to capitalism that emerge and flourish but what we also notice is that what feudal elites in Europe wanted was either a return to feudalism so there was a sort of move to sort of re-peasantize but a few of them engaged in this kind of colonial capitalism and they were the ones who really prevailed and they prevailed through a combination not just of the success of their economic exploitation but also the way that they were able to turn money into weapons and back into money again. The arms industry is an important part of the transition and the ready deployment of large garrisons of state sponsored force are precisely what it is that allows capitalism to prevail. Capitalism is born of war and it'll die away and I think this is the worry here that actually while there are lots of social movements around the world doing incredible things almost all of them are being all the activists in these organizations are seeing rates of assassination and state sponsored violence that are much higher than they were even 10 years ago. This is pointing to a sort of general crisis with the rise of fascism again that I am very worried about Jason and I note in the book that we're not pan glossians here we're not saying well of course capitalism is going to end so that we can have lots of communist utopias flourish. We're pointing to what emerges from crisis is not just these wonderful communities where labor is not exploited and care is valued but also fascist communities in which the tendencies of the cheapening particularly of lives are taken to their ultimate extreme where people are returned back to nature to be considered subhuman in order that they be exploited. I mentioned in the talk yesterday that I live in Texas where already we have Nazis and sort of fascists of various kinds who have embraced the logic of climate change and now say well of course climate change is real but what that means is that we need to guard our national resources much more tightly and we need to recognize that it is immigrants who are taking our stuff and therefore they must die and that was part of the manifesto that one of the mass shooters in El Paso had this was his logic and his justification for killing I think it was a dozen migrants or a dozen people of color we don't even know whether they're migrants and it doesn't matter but that was his idea and so I worry about that because it's certainly the case that when the far right embraces climate change and there's a far right writer in the United States who has already embraced some of the logic around the food system and is now advocating a certain kind of racial blood and soil approach to transforming the food system in America these kinds of ideas are equally possible out of the end of capitalism and that's a grave source for worry. Yeah I can imagine I didn't know all of them how well thought things seem to happen right I mean they seem to organize at the same time so it's these two parallel streams that seem to emerge as you mentioned them so if capitalism were to end through a crisis how do we get out of this vicious circle you mentioned reparation ecology for instance we also mentioned some social movements at the beginning via Campesina we can also talk about the Zapatistas or the MST can you provide with some alternative storylines that we could you know at least to be inspired of well I'm very excited about some of the work in my latest book that I did with a medical doctor Rupa Maria the book's called Inflamed and we're we use the fact that most people's bodies are suffering some sort of chronic inflammation as a way of telling a story about how health and food capitalism are bound together and what we do is get to look at social movements around the world that are doing it right and a lot of these movements are indigenous and indigenous led and that I find very interesting because again capitalism has not been total capitalism needs these frontiers and right now many of the frontiers certainly in Turtle Island in what's called North America is are trying to move through indigenous land indigenous protest movements have done more than any other policy in North America to be able to keep fossil fuels in the ground through direct action and through mobilizing around being able to protect sacred spaces if you want a policy that keeps fossil fuels in the ground for a decade more effectively than anything else this is your policy it's to put your bodies on the front line guided by indigenous movements that I think is a terrific example but then also and remember you don't have to be indigenous to be part of the movement you can take direction from indigenous leaders you don't have to claim indigeneity yourself and I think that's important particularly with the rise of in the United States of the phenomenon of pretendian of often white people who are who claim an indigenous grandmother back in the day and it turns out that actually they're as white as a driven snow so the but I think that's an example then look at the MST the rural landless workers movement in Brazil who have been occupying unused land legally by the way you know there's in the Napoleonic code for land use in Brazil if land isn't being used for a social purpose after seven years if it's been used for speculation but nothing's happening there then it reverts back to being accessible to people who will improve it that means this land is being occupied by the MST it's terrific but what they're doing is not just farming and engaging in traditional agriculture they're doing really cutting edge agroecological food systems where they're sequestering carbon but they're increasing biodiversity they're not using industrial fertilizers and pesticides they're making sure that everyone gets fed a balanced and nutritious diet and they're working together to be able to build these communities and defend them against the predations of the violence that the capitalist landowners would like to meet out on them but you don't even have to think of rural areas in South Africa I'm lucky enough to work with the movement called Abat Lalibas in Jondolo which is people who live in Shacks it's a movement of now 110,000 people who are fighting for dignity and for housing but we're also engaged in agroecological combining as well so we've got some really good examples around the world I could go on but I think if people want to know more La Via Campesina has some really good examples in their stable so what is to is the idea to generalize these movements and extend them into a mass population you, I mean we also are in this framework of the Beyond Growth Conference and there is this story about the growth as well and how does that converge does it converge you are worried actually that the growth might be just BS or this new term if it does not includes migration challenges if it does not include racial challenges if it does not include many other topics that seem to be missed in this equation or how do we converge these movements for popular movements and then at the same time top level challenges I think that there is a way in which all of these movements can be understood as organizations of radical care and what they're doing is caring for one another and caring for the planet and caring that their exploitation and cheapening should stop I'm interested in the idea of the low carbon economy that is made possible by regimes of care that are radically egalitarian and if there is a generalization of that idea I'm all for it but I also think that again you can't have this generalization without remembering how we got here otherwise we fall back into this idea of the capitalist amnesia and that's what worries me about degrowth is that we can't have a conversation about degrowth in Europe without understanding all the wealth that we're surrounded by people should know right now we're in Brussels we're in Belgium which was made possible by the exploitation of the Congo under King Leopold he owned the country the Congo free state was what it was called it was owned as a piece of private property by the king of Belgium and yet as we heard Ossilo van der Leyen talking about how wonderful it is that our green hydrogen targets which Europe is on course to miss entirely but how our green hydrogen is going to make new worlds possible and everyone's going to be driving a Tesla and where do the raw materials for the production of these things come from but from the remnants of Belgian colonialism you can't imagine this future without reckoning with its past and I worry that degrowth is avoiding the reckoning and not just in terms of European colonialism that's important but India is entirely capable of taking the mantle that the British gave them and deepening the exploitation particularly of indigenous people and of the working class in India so there needs to be a reckoning also not just country by country but also recognizing that there's a class reckoning that's due here and I think perhaps to end this I think you managed to tell stories in interesting in different ways through media, through films through books what is so attractive to you to tell these stories in different media or how do you go about having this non-traditional career between you know very technocratic to activists, to scholars, to mixing all of this together once again what drives you, how do you go about as a human being? Honestly I never wanted to be a writer as I say I wanted to write the equation and then just go to the beach and play computer games or whatever it is but I found the reason I left Food First in part, this organization I was working in the early 2000s was because I was writing this stuff no one was reading it I was writing fantastic policy papers on the world trade really good, really good analysis no one gave a shit and that's not their fault, that's my fault and so I wrote Stuffed and Starved as a way of saying well look, if you don't particularly want to care about the WTO's agreement on agriculture and its sanitary and phytosanitary measures you know, I get that but here's a way in which I can make you care about it and so that's why I wrote Stuffed and Starved and it doesn't come naturally to me it took 26 drafts of that, of the proposal and 16, 17 drafts of the book to get it to where it was okay and I'm still not happy with it, I still would go back and rewrite it completely, considerably if I could but that's been the journey I'm on where I find that I wanted to help folk I want to teach people I kind of have that bone in me that enjoys teaching and I want to work with people to say what, you think this, but actually let me take you on a journey and I have to take you on a journey because otherwise you won't recognize where you started from so let's go on this journey and if people are going to be on a journey with you you have to feed them, you have to entertain them you have to keep people engaged and that's why even though I prefer the theory I would write like Deluz and Gattari if I could but I want to read things like the world ecology ideas in Seven Cheap Things and then particularly these days it's entirely the case that 10 years ago I could say to my students here's a book a week and my students would be like I don't want to do that but they would do it and now it's almost impossible and that's in part because of the attention economy being much more in students' lives but it's also the case that the culture of book reading isn't there and it's also the case that students are much more exploited and so they're working two or three jobs and it's hard for them to pay attention but it's also the case that it's not just students who I want to communicate with so I did a documentary film called The Ants and the Grasshopper it took us 10 years of filming and we then in the end it started off being going to be narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal it was going to be one of these things it was on prestige TV one of these things but it didn't work with the story that we wanted to tell it was a story about Malawi and Farmer and her life and it only made sense for her to be the narrator in the film so we had to decolonize ourselves but that means that this is a film that's not going to be commercially successful instead what we had we raised money for an engagement campaign so that the film was screening in places that films don't normally screen so we screen a lot of churches and a lot of town halls and a lot of community groups because it's a way of reaching a new audience and connecting ideas around race and capital and the environment in ways that these that folk don't normally get to think about and I'm excited about that I enjoyed making the film if I get behind the camera for another one it'll have to be for a very good reason but I don't do this because I desperately want to I don't because it's what the moment needs and even if that moment ten years ago was different for the moment now I think this film is useful right now perhaps to wrap it up there is well we've touched a number of points and I think these can once again I've tried to make them as accessible as possible and you've certainly done so how can we summarize some of these elements perhaps what is a message to be mindful of when we try to look at all of these interconnected systemic challenges is there I don't know if mantra is the word but is there something that we can remind ourselves of paying attention to some specific elements in order to to always keep in mind retrace well being mindful of this amnesia, collective amnesia and bring this to the future that's a great great question Aristean what a wonderful way to end I mean I think I mean the sort of story here is always about hidden things right and if we're looking at the moment then I would say well look who's doing the care work is the hidden thing to be mindful of but that can succumb to the amnesia and so I think the question is who did the care work so that we could be here and if we ask that question then we ask not only how is it that we happen to be having this conversation right here right now but whose work in the past was not just occluded but made it possible for the recognized work to happen and that brings us back to understanding the work of women and usually women of color in the global south whose work made it possible for us to be here today and whose names are not any of the buildings here and asking who's whose care made it possible for us to be here is both a way of embodying a certain kind of gratitude to our ancestors but recognizing that the way we move certainly here in Europe depends on other people's ancestors other people's grandmother and without their care for the resources and the labor that made this wealth possible the ideas of degrowth are for nothing any books or films that you would like to suggest to go deeper on this past care or remembering care or acknowledging care? I mean everything by Silvia Federici is fantastic obviously but we devoted quite a lot of ways of thinking about that care the care that women do but also the care that nature offers in inflamed which I did with Rupa Maria so there are a few references in there that might be worth checking out too great well Brosh thanks so much it's been it has been an awesome pleasure not only to have the privilege to spend an hour with you also please share this discussion with people I think it's going to touch a number of you and a number of your colleagues also don't hesitate to look at the other episode with Jason so that you get the two pieces of the puzzle together it has been challenging for me because it's not my I was or I still am perhaps more of a technocratic point of view that I'm slowly changing and I love getting guided or getting help to do so so yeah thanks to you thanks Raj as well and thanks to Andreas as well for welcoming us here that's it fantastic thank you