 Once again, apologies and hello and welcome to the M25 alternative climate conference cup off. We have an exciting new program planned for three days of eight panels that are subjects at the heart of the crisis, but largely lacking from the mainstream conversations. To learn more about the program, follow the link that will come up in the chat. So as another cop is behind us, we are faced once again with the document that fails to reflect the urgency and scale of a climate crisis and days full of weak pledges that are likely to join the long list of broken and unrealized promises of climate conferences past. I am joined today by academics Jason Hickel and Max Isle to discuss the past, the present of our economic systems and how did we end up here. But first an introduction, Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author and fellow of Royal Society of Arts and a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as visiting senior fellow at the International Inequality Institute at the Longman School of Economics. He is on the statistical advisory panel of the UN Human Development Report, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe and Harvard Lancet Commission on Reparation and Distributive Justice. Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development, and ecological economics, which are also the subject levels to recent books that divide a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions and less is more how degrowth will save the world. Max Isle is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and Environment, a post-doctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Buffingen University in the Netherlands, apologies if I didn't pronounce that well. He's an associate editor at the Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society and has written for the Journal of Peasant Studies and a review of African political economy. You could also have seen him in multiple outlets, including Jacobin Magazine, Viewpoint, Monthly Reboot, or Monthly Review, my apologies. And he has a recent book out with Puto Press that's called The People's Green New Deal. Jason, Max, welcome and thank you so much for being here. So you have both worked extensively about the history and presence of global inequalities and driving forces that are behind and that have eventually led to the imbalances of today. When we talk about progress, mostly it's one of those words that has picked up a lot of baggage and ask some people, some people give you different definitions. So I would, for clarity, I would like to focus on what has been usually used by people with power and lots of status to justify policies. So economic progress and I would like us to talk about how economic progress is referring to the development of the global south. In that context, how growth has been used to evolve, sorry, has been used to justify what I would like to think, I hope I'm not too optimistic, acts and actions that would be appalling, even cruel to most people. From the colonial past to post-war era, let's dissect this together. So Max, maybe you would like to start? Absolutely. So to contextualize these ideas of growth and development, of course they go all the way back to the late 1800s certainly in terms of the development of the discourse of development as a tool of British colonialism in India and then in the interwar period as well. But they really reached full flower in terms of providing an alibi for the developmental and economic policies that the North wanted to pursue in the south and on a world scale. And the aftermath of the Second World War suddenly became immediately normative on a world scale that needed to carry out some form of increase in the people's access to good things. It became deeply normative especially because of the face of the Soviet threat, which was providing an alternative architecture for organizing society that was the very least providing people's basic needs at a fairly high level of sophistication, plenitude. The dogma of progress and development then took on new form as a set of prescriptions for the south suggesting the south should essentially follow the same developmental path that the North had supposedly followed with the development of science, reason, technology, the evolution of a middle class, ever widening the fusion of science and technology and this would allow for what's called the takeoff into sustained and self-sustaining. Of course it was based on a widespread mythology by the course of Western industrialization and so-called development, which had actually been based on de-development, genocide, colonialism, income suppression, wide-scale deflation, massive surplus drain from slave trade, India, Indonesia and so forth. The idea that the south could actually develop in terms of the qualitative increase of good life on a society-wide scale was in turn pure mythology that could only be used to justify continuation of accumulation. How much do you think that the average person is aware since we have so many mythologies about development of capitalism? We are often told that global south countries are just too corrupt to do good for themselves economically then hence they must be directed either by using debt and the hand of the IMF, but I mean we are really basically what's really happening is that we're preventing these countries from using their own resources like what you have said to develop a middle class society and how do you think people are aware of this? Because it's been a while now, this was may probably most people were not aware of this during the Cold War, but do you think people are aware of this right now? Yes. Do I think people are aware of this depends which people? People in the south are deeply aware of it, but this is by the strong alert and during the alert of anti-colonial. In terms of people in the north, I think people are aware at different levels, different scales and different degrees of knowledge. I don't think people are totally ignorant of it. I think there has been success in popularizing certain aspects of it in different sectors of northern populations and of course, for example, you don't need to tell a lot of people in the United States that the slave trade contributed significantly to northern primary capital. There's a certain swath of the community in the United States that knows that very well to take one example. There are other swaths of people in the United States who more or less know that and more or less support it. And that's why they're revengeous white supremacists who actually want to reimposition of that. You also see people who are aware of it and this is why they advocate Malthusian population control hard and borders because there's an understanding that there was a process of looting and it should be sustained. And of course, this is also a knowledge of the highest level climate. Todd Stern said in 2009, we acknowledge our responsibility for the historical process of taking too much atmospheric space for carbon dioxide, but we reject actually any reparations to act upon that responsibility. So at least speaking of the United States, there's an institutionalized process of accepting responsibility of accepting discursive rhetorical and performative responsibility for certain tests so that for certain historical acts, so long as the actual prescriptions and reparations, which should logically, morally and ethically and programmatically flow from an understanding of those facts, are reject, right? This is kind of the artifice of American liberal hegemony where we can understand those things so long as we do not act. Jason, you've also just as an academic, but also as a communicator with your books have really tried to outline the not only the skeleton, but the everyday workings of how the hypocrisy and the double standards applied to how we talk about the global self and development and the North's role in it. So would you agree with Max? Would you like to add some things that you thought were missing? Yeah, no, I do agree with Max. So I mean, in terms of framing this historically, I think it's important to understand that that capitalist growth has always required some kind of imperial arrangement, some kind of colonization. That was very clear during the colonial period, but it remains true today and we can discuss what that looks like. And the reason for this is simply this, right? Like when we talk about growth, we're not talking about an increase in production to meet human needs, right? Under capitalism, growth is not about use value or social provisioning or anything along those lines, right? It's specifically about increasing commodity production, specifically commodified goods and services and commodification. In order to generate and accumulate surplus value, right? So I mean, this is, that's the sole objective. Now in order to sustain a process of perpetual surplus accumulation, capitalism requires input prices to be as low as possible, right? So it always requires a kind of cheapening effects. Now to achieve that, you can, this cheapening of labor and resources and other inputs that are required for the productive process. You can sabotage your own domestic base, right? Your own domestic resource base and your domestic working class, you know, by cutting productions on labor, cutting wages, cutting environmental productions, whatever it might be. But of course this hurts people, right? It harms communities and sooner or later you're likely to face some kind of revolution or uprising against you, right? So in order to prevent that eventuality from like this contradiction from sort of realizing itself, you have to have some kind of third party whose wages and resources you can cheapen, right? Without them, you know, without them fighting back effectively. And this is where the colonies come in and have always served this purpose, right? And this argument is very well articulated actually by Utsa and Prabhupatnik in several of their works. So yeah, so I mean the key thing here is that imperialism is like a structurally necessary feature of capitalist growth, right? And crucially, this arrangement was brought into question, right? In the middle of the 20th century with the rise of the radical anti-colonial movements across the global south, they succeeded in achieving political decolonization. And then in the 50s, 60s and 70s went about a process of achieving also economic decolonization, right? Effectively reducing the reliance on northern imports and northern capital, you know, improving wages, using tariffs and subsidies to build their own domestic industries and build a kind of economic industrial sovereignty. And it was successful. They achieved remarkable gains in human development and economic development after several centuries of basically brutal immiseration, right? Like, and this is a crucial point. The first several hundred years of capitalist history, virtually everywhere capitalism was imposed across the world, it led to a notable decline in human welfare standards, you know, serial famines, genocides, massive disruption of subsistence economies, et cetera, et cetera. So I mean the idea that capitalism somehow caused progress in social indicators is just completely nonsense. We don't see progress begin to arise until organized socialist movements and anti-colonial struggle emerges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But anyways, yeah, so during the middle of the 20th century, you have this successful anti-colonial movement establishing economic sovereignty. And the results of this is that it poses a significant threat to capitalist growth in the core states, right? They face a crisis of stagflation, right? Like rising input costs, because they no longer have access to cheap labor and raw materials in the south. And also a stagnation of economic growth. I mean the profit mechanism begins to break down under capitalism, right, as far as capital is concerned. In order to restore the necessary mechanism for capitalist growth, they have to basically re-intervene against the global south, right? In the form first of several military interventions designed to topple these progressive independence leaders, right? So I mean Salvador Allende is one example in Chile, but Sukarno in Indonesia, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran. I mean, you know, I mean, many of the key, the most influential leaders of a non-aligned movement from that era, from the progressive era, were toppled by Western coups. And then they were, of course, replaced. These leaders were replaced with dictators that were more amenable to Western interests. Effectively re-cheapening labor and resources to restore the imperial arrangement. So, and that's where we're at today, right? Like the imposition of neoliberalism across the global south was not some kind of mistake. And this is the way that many progressives would come to speak of it, right? Like the imposition of neoliberalism was some kind of mistake. No, it was a necessary next stage of capitalist development. It was essential for restoring the imperial arrangement that underpins capitalist growth in the core. And this is the situation we're in today. So what's required is an effective anti-colonial struggle. And these days, of course, in the absence of a progressive political class in most of the global south, this is the turf, effectively, of radical social movements across the region. And, you know, their demands are manifest very clearly in documents like the People's Agreement of Cotrabamba and several other key texts, which recognize that imperial arrangements continue to exist. And this is the major driver of both mass impoverishment across the global south, right, as well as ecological breakdown. So, yeah, so I think understanding ourselves is kind of in this, like towards the end of the second, the second stage of imperialism is crucial to seeing the broader picture. Thank you. And so the climate crisis has really taken this imbalance and this history into a whole new league before it was the anti-colonial struggles and supporting anti-colonial struggles has been a call to justice and humanity and morality or depending how you frame it. However, now with, and as we saw during these weeks, and the resistance coming from more vulnerable countries in the global south during the conference, it's not only something that we should do in for humanity or for betterment, or these are always loaded concepts anyway, but really it's very at the heart of being able to resolve the crisis or start to resolve at least the crisis we are facing. Unfortunately, what we are talking now amongst each other, we are kind of the converted and it's very important that that this message becomes easily digestible, understandable, and even a message inspired, an inspiration, of course the global south does not need this, but for the global north, for the people, the average worker in the global north, surely it can become very valuable, but unfortunately we lack the platforms to explain these things, we have so much bad stereotypes, bad history to prevent us. So however, the last since 2008, there has been more a subconscious awakening in some ways. Some people, there's more and more questioning of narratives about globalization, the non-stop need for cheap labor, and the austerity which the global south was already, it was not at all unfamiliar with the subject because of IMF and structural readjustment programs, but now that the global north has lived through austerity, do you think we can, is there hope to speak in a way and communicate in a way that we can truly make these messages popular and even energizing people and because maybe I'm a bit of a fool, let's say, but I mean I certainly find it very, it's like a fuel on the fire, there's a potential there that is amazing, so what do you think, what should we try to do, is there hope to communicate to a wider masses these very complex histories and uniting struggles between the north and the south? Well it's an interesting question, I mean yes, I think that there's possibly a shift in that direction among western progressives I guess, it's hard for me to say but clearly this energy is there in the global south and has been for several decades. So look, I think that in terms of the question of hope, it's an interesting one, you know, I mean hope is of course important and we need it to keep ourselves going etc, but ultimately like our hope can only ever be as robust as our struggle, and I think now our struggle is actually quite weak, I mean there's been, when it comes to the question of climate breakdown, there's been a real over-reliance on our leaders to take action on this and I think that the results of COP26 just, you know, they're a wake-up call, I mean it's clear that asking politely for the ruling class to stop climate destruction is not going to work and at some point we have to face up to that reality and think of the political formations that are required to bring about the kind of radical transformation that's needed here and I think on this front, look, on this front I think that it's important to recognize that the environmentalist movements is not structurally capable of pulling this off alone, okay, and I think that's clear for two reasons and I'm talking about the environmentalist movement in the global north, the first reason is that for the most part they do not have a sufficiently radical analysis of the problem, right, they tend to regards the problem of ecological breakdown as primarily having to do with individual behavior, individual consumer behavior, right, so we have to make personal decisions to consume less and so on and of course no one's denying that's important especially for those who have the purchasing power to consume beyond what they require, but they don't for the most part yet recognize the structural drivers of the crisis, which is clearly capitalism, imperialism and growthism, right, I mean this is sort of the triad of issues here that we have to face, so you need a more structural analysis to recognize that these are the drivers of the crisis, typically where does this analysis come from, it comes from working class formations who have a, who tend to have like a more robust analysis of capitalism, right, the problem with working class formations in the global north right now is that they tend to line up with capital actually in calling for more growth because they see growth as necessary for improving livelihoods and jobs and employment, right, and of course these are important objectives, livelihoods and employment are important objectives as a member of labor unions for my whole life, I align with those objectives, but the point is that it's a failure of our political imagination to believe that growth is the best way to achieve that, right, it's effectively saying let's hand the capitalist class what they want and then hope for crumbs to fall from that table which is not a politically acceptable, right, approach and so of course there's a more direct approach that we can take which is that there should be a demand for a shorter working week, a public job guarantee, universal basic services, you know, living wages, etc., etc., like effectively effectively taking the question of livelihoods and employment off the table entirely, right, I mean these problems, these social problems can be solved directly with radical policy and so we have to be lining up behind such demands, right, now so this is going to require alliances between the environmentalist movement and the labor movement, this is crucial, without this kind of alliance it's not going to happen, right, so the environmental movement has to be able to line up behind demands for a social guarantee because only once the question of livelihoods and employment is off the table can we talk seriously about scaling down unnecessary parts of the economy, right, this is what de-growth argues, parts of the economy that are organized around excess commodity production for the sake of corporate profit and expansion or elite power or elite consumption, right, and it's not difficult to think of the industries or forms of production that are organized around that logic, so we have to break this log jam through something like a demand for a social guarantee because the truth is that fright is for future and extinction rebellion as powerful as they are can never pull off like the kind of coordinated strike action, for example, that would be necessary to force radical change, that's going to have to come from other kinds of political formations such as the labor movement, so creating these alliances is literally essential and that requires work, right, it doesn't happen on its own, it requires the hard work of mobilizing door-to-door building, you know, wall-to-wall solidarities so that you can fight against political propaganda and take power or push incumbents where necessary, I mean think about the kind of organizing behind, say, the civil rights movement, okay, but then the second thing that's necessary here is alliances between political formations in the global north and anti-colonial social movements in the global south, they're the ones who have the real skin in the game right now, I mean climate apocalypse is a reality, not a distant future, but a reality for people in the south now, they're aware of that, they're organizing anti-colonial struggle in response, they realize that excess resource appropriation in the global north and energy appropriation in the global north is an act of colonization, is an act of the colonization of southern ecosystems and global commons and they're pushing against that, these are the demands that we should be aligning with, these are the struggles we should be supporting, we should know their texts, we should support their demands, without this kind of internationalism, I'm afraid that there's there's just no way, again, to pull off the kind of coordinated action that's necessary and I think that's essential to grasp. Thank you so much, I'm just going to, I've been told that the chat was not working, so those who want to use the chat to ask questions please refresh your page, thanks. Moving on, Max, is there anything you would like to add to this before we move on from this question? Yeah, absolutely, so I think the, I think those are all critical points, I would add one more set of critical points. The reference points for northern struggles of course have to be the vibrant radical socialist, radical nationalist, anti-imperialist, popular ecology movements in the south, but people in the north and movements in the north, need to accept self-determination of peoples in the south as crystallized in state institutions, in other words, the salience of the national and when this is always a thorny issue when it's brought up, it's always a thorny issue in particular because people, it's accepted and the abstract and rejected and this needs to be confronted head on, it can't be a sidestep. If you talk to most northern progressives, they will say of course they support anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and self-determination. If you ask them their opinion on whether or not the US should be carrying out sanctions on Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, they will be silenced. Those sanctions destabilize entire societies, hit them with a hammer, allow corruption to diffuse through the entire body publicly, set the stage for increased state repression of popular movements, allow for a deflection of internal struggles for popular ecology to a defense of national sovereignty which becomes then necessary in the face of the northern storm coming in. If northern progressives are not prepared to take active stands in organizational and ideological defense of the self-determination of southern states against the actual really existing coercive measures of northern imperialism and northern capitalists, then it's quite impossible I think for us to actually have a north-south diversity, unity and diversity in the north-south political organizational and mobilizational convergence, precisely because anything radically progressive that will emerge from this will be decapitated. I think the most telling example specifically as it relates to that is ecological movement. Although I think that we need to protect the space even for governments that are not talking quite so openly about ecology to move in that direction, but the most blatant is the coup d'etat against the Morales government, which elicited a widespread debate amongst northern progressives about whether or not that was actually a coup d'etat and whether or not it reflected some sort of popular support. And finally, it was preceded by actually a discourse of ecological mismanagement within the burning Amazon in the part of the supposed part of the Morales government. That was accepted. All these discourses, all these inquiritudes, all these separations, all these worries, all these acts of soaring inclusion in so far as that it's tolerated. What is being tolerated as a consequence of the sowing of that discourse is the ideological and political disorganization of people in the north and the resulting incapacity to arrive at a north-south development. It's colonialism and fascism by effect rather than by effect and that needs to be confronted directly otherwise otherwise we're just chatting at the doors. Let's go ahead. I was just going to talk a bit more about this. I think it's an important one actually if you're okay with that. I completely agree. I think this is so important and crucially also because look, to be honest, I'm not sure that right now I see the political formations in the global north being sufficiently strong to successfully demand degrowth, which is clearly what has to happen. I should just preface this by saying, look, the ecological crisis is being driven by excess resource use and energy use in the global north. Degrowth is simply a call for that to be scaled down. Of course, we argue this can be done well at the same time improving social outcomes just not under capitalism. Now, and simply by reorganizing production around meeting human needs and well-being and ecological stability rather than around the lead accumulation. It's actually more likely that something like degrowth could be affected by an anti-colonial struggle from the south. For this reason, because the majority of excess resource use in the global north is net appropriated from the global south. The resources are taken from the south and this is net of trade on an extraordinary scale. The benefits accrue in the global north, whereas the plunder occurs in the global south. This is an effect of unequal exchange. Unequal exchange is simply an effect also of global north states and corporations depressing the prices of labor and resources in the global south. As an effect of depressed prices for every unit of labor and resources that the south imports from the north, they have to export many more times to pay for it. This leads to a net drain of resources from south to north. This is what is sustaining ecological breakdown as well as sustaining mass impoverishment in the global south, perpetuating impoverishment. Those resources are therefore no longer available to be used for sovereign development. An anti-colonial movement that is capable of establishing economic sovereignty would effectively cut off that supply of appropriation, therefore affecting a degrowth in the global north and a reclaiming of resources to be organized around human needs in the global south. This is the outcome we want. Here is the thing which is what Max is pointing to, is that every time there are moves towards effective economic sovereignty, there is a severe backlash from global north states and corporations, sanctions, coup d'etat, etc. It is essential, as Max underlines here, that we be prepared that if we are going to call for economic sovereignty in the south and line up behind those demands, then when it actually happens we can fight the propaganda that justifies these kinds of interventions against such movements, the thorough demonization. And this propaganda is extremely powerful. It is so powerful that virtually everybody in the global north was convinced that Mandela was evil when he was fighting for something as basic as the end of apartheid, something fairly liberal really. Something similar again happens every time, but Bolivia is a good example. What are our strategies for fighting that propaganda? We have not done well on this so far, so I think that's a crucial strategy point I think for anti-imperialists in the global north and for socialists in the global north to consider. Yes, thank you. The severity of the backlash is very real and it is a big hurdle we have to overcome. You guys really well explained that, explained very well. And just to, like even the severity of the backlash against Assange and the silence against him, for example, or just broadly in the issue of Palestine or South American governments and sanctions and everything as you've said is, I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot, so my apologies. I'm using this session a bit selfishly, but do you think there's really, because there is like a misconception as, as if some people on the global north see themselves as, like because they've been like formatted to see themselves as consumers, so they, when they think about themselves, they are thinking global north problems, like eating organic food and this and that, and things they could do as consumers to help the climate question, which we should know by now that it's kind of empty. And then they see it as a separate struggle, those struggles of the peoples of the global south. And so I mean, from what we've been talking about, you would agree that this would like, how would you say clearing out this fog, that these are two separate separate issues and two separate worlds and struggles and really understanding that the economic forces that hurt one part ends up very latently and indirectly in the less rest and extend hurting the global north. And do you think communicating this would help the people in the global north and how can we do this? Like, instead of talking about plastic straws, could we talk about how most countries in the global north haven't been able to access and use their resources to develop their democracies to develop their own institutions and have, for example, a good waste collecting system, which ends up putting plastics in the water that ends up polluting the water. Would discourses like this be helpful or not? Would this kind of reasoning be the right way, you think? Because I'm sure there's lots of activists listening to this show. So I think we have to try it out. I don't think we know, necessarily, what discourse will work. If we had an easy answer as to what discourse of strategies to use, we would be using them and they would be working, right? So we don't have that easy answers, of course, because these are not easy problems. But I think we can certainly push forward on certain fronts that at least see a compelling whether or not they will be successful. You take a very, an example that's only at a slight divergence from the one. Why is it that it's much more popular within left liberal spaces, let us say, in the North to discuss the impact of beef rather than the impact of the U.S. military on the world's climate system? Why is that the case, right? I mean, clearly, of course, this is appealing to an entrenched Western chauvinism. This is Western chauvinism, is the natural kind of cultural ideological corollary to a system of uneven accumulation on a world scale. You necessarily, the concomitance of that is an ideology that justifies the uneven accumulation of wealth. And that is consciously produced by the regnant ideological institutions, including in their allegedly progressive variety. It's natural that this ideology penetrates, including into the progressive. Now, so one, I mean, part of resisting it is identifying its presence in the first place. You need to identify its presence and then say, put it forward. Why is there more of an emphasis on beef rather than the U.S. military? When the U.S. military, and this isn't to say, of course, there's a clear that there's a Western over-construction of beef. This is almost certainly the case, but U.S. military is one of, it's probably the single most horrendous institution on a world scale over the last seven. So why is it? And why is it that people are focusing on whatever China is doing in its Western mediums rather than what the U.S. military has done on a world scale? These are not, one provides a venue for action and one does not. One provides a venue for demonization of the enemy and one does not. So we need activists and progressives to consciously resist this ideological nature that actually serves to cleave away Northern progressive sentiment from the struggles of the South by displacing politics from the North to the South and saying the South is what needs to fix itself rather than looking in the mirror and saying we have things to fix domestically in terms of our own ideological consciousness in order to arrive at an appropriate ideological mindset for North-South without political, organizational, mobilizational, and finding developmental convergence. That needs to be addressed. I mean, whether or not that can actually be successful, we can have no idea. We cannot know. I mean, it's a Pascals wager. I mean, we definitely need, I think, to do that in order to carry out struggles that hopefully can be successful and that can move our ecological, political, social movements together around shared demands that allow for unity and diversity and reflect the different locations from which we're entering the political field North and South, right? Because they're not the same. Whether that can be successful is just an unknowable question. Maybe yes, maybe no. How about, what do you think, Jason? Yeah, no. I mean, I think it's, I think this is essential to attempts, especially when you consider the fact that, look, existing mainstream green discourse in the global North presupposes several, presupposes the continuation of several imperialist features of the world economy. In fact, they're exacerbation. So, for example, let me just, let me discuss climate for a second, right? So, right now, existing, the existing discourse, of course, is that the global North should continue to grow and simply make that growth green in terms of energy. This means trying to decarbonize as quickly as possible. Now, of course, the IPCC is clear that as long as high income nations continue to pursue growth as usual, it's impossible for them to decarbonize fast enough to stay under 1.5 degrees, simply using the deployment of renewable energy and efficiency improvements and so on. Impossible, right? The IPCC mitigation scenarios and the politicians who follow them square that conundrum, right? They reconcile that conundrum by presupposing extraordinary quantities of negative emissions through schemes such as BEX, right? Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, something like 80-90% of the IPCC mitigation scenarios for 1.5-degree degrees, presuppose large quantities of negative emissions through biofuel, okay? Now, we're talking about biofuel plantations three times the size of India, okay? Ask yourself where those biofuel plantations are supposed to come from. Are they going to come from Finland's, right? No, they're going to be appropriated from the biomass-rich regions of the Global South. This is inevitable. In fact, it's in fact presupposed in the mitigation scenarios themselves that Northern energy privilege and growthism will be sustained by relying on biofuel appropriation from the Global South on a mass scale, right? So, leaving aside the question of whether mass negative emissions technologies are feasible at scale, which scientists, of course, say they're not, leaving aside even the ecological consequences of vast monoculture and even the famines that would be generated by appropriating agricultural land for this purpose, et cetera, et cetera, there's the colonial dimension that no one has questions. This is never questions in the discourse of global north progressives, okay? Who continue, by the way, to promote this idea that rich countries should continue to grow the capitalist economy despite the fact that it already uses resources and energy vastly in excess of what is required to meet human needs, even at a very high standard, right? What is going on in the progressive movement such that this is considered okay, right? This is an overt expression of relying on imperialist appropriation to support the continuation of a destructive status quo in the Global North. And the same feature is represented not only when it comes to BEX, but also when it comes to things like the Ezra Klein vision of electric SUVs for all, right? Like, where are these materials going to come from? We know they're already appropriated from the Global South under tremendously destructive ecological and social conditions, right? The idea that we can just ramp up green technology, which is materially intensive and do so indefinitely, right? A continuation to support continued growth relies on just this sort of easy assumption that the colonial arrangement is okay, okay? Like, you know, eco-socialism without an anti-imperialist lens is not eco-socialism at all. It's effectively imperial eco-fascism, okay? It literally relies on this kind of destructive accumulation and appropriation and dismisses the concerns, by the way, of social movements across the Global South who have been pointing this conundrum out, this problem out for several decades, right? So this is a true failure of internationalism in the Global North that all of us should be significantly troubled by. And until we confront these assumptions, then this kind of easy, lazy, green, colonialist ethic of Western progressives is going to continue. And it's very dangerous. It's dangerous for all of life on Earth, but it's particularly dangerous for our sisters and brothers in the South. And I think unacceptable. Thank you so much for bringing that up. That goes well. I wanted to transition now a bit to talking about COP and also land in the Global South. So again, there was long talk about carbon markets and offsetting and biofuels. Biden, I think, thanked the agribusiness heads. And land has become, I think there is a new place for land in the public conscience. And so, however, when we talk about, as you're saying, like the craziness of an idea of green SUVs powered by lithium or offsetting, or just we'll just burn biofuels instead of biofuels won't have to be grown on land. And I think, would you agree that there is a part of this comes from how we are alienated from the relations and trade? And like, nobody really has a vision of a visual of the global economy. And in some aspects, how ridiculous it is, like how sometimes what these long supply chains do to people in the Global South, because they're always sick that for more materials plus cheaper labor. And what it does for the planet, because it's reliant on fossil fuels to keep the chains running. So, but there is also a wider issue with land, even now in the Global North, cities and housing crises, northern farmers, small farmers struggling a lot, Bill Gates buying Arab arable land all around the US. So I think there's a big space in the public conscience for this. And there was a big push in the COP in this direction too. So, how would you, what would your analysis be on that? And how should we be talking about the land question? Is there a way of connecting the struggles and hopefully plant the seeds for the global internationalists, the solidarity that has yet to really grow out of infancy? There's space for it. But again, it's a question of molding the contours of the struggle to make sure it builds on the appropriate. And here the ideology movement I think is contradictory. On the one hand, there is a widespread on ease, for example, with the amount of farmland that Bill Gates is buying up. And I think this reflects a kind of ambient awareness that what's being planned by him, and in the big areas as well as in the must-consolidate, is a massive monopoly control over use values, over things that people need to survive and prosper on a scale well beyond the heyday monopoly, shifting to a qualitative sense. And of course, I think land makes that literally tangible in a very real way. So this is significant. And I think there is a significantly rising interest in land, including indigenous struggles in the North that just reflects a certain interest and shift in the direction of the question of the importance of land and anti-colonialism, equally with the food justice movement. Again, though, I think we just have to be aware of the different polarities that structure this kind of ideological shift. There's that on the one hand. On the other, there's still a widespread interest amongst progressives in afforestation or reforestation, for example, as a solution to the climate crisis. And then that's retrofitted and stuffed into purely capitalist natural climate solutions that you see coming from UNDP, also coming from Bill Gates. And so you see a kind of grabbing of this interest in ecological, seemingly politically ecologically just solutions based on land to the climate crisis, grabbing this kind of green sentiment and remolding it before it becomes a green red sentiment, let alone a green, red, north, south convergent sentiment, and just driving it back into the motor of what's sure to be worse than monopoly accumulations, this will be absolute oligarchy control over the world. And I think this is a function of a frequent inability to keep kind of the politics of it in command. So of course, there's an enduring anti land, anti rural mindset, including the kind of apartheid mindset of humans being radically separate from non human nature, rather than living in comity with it. And even the ideological production of humans is separate from nature, traces it's staff groups. Yorkian colonialism, rising European Christian civilization and then the rising race consciousness which emerged as colonialism. This is why, of course, there's such hostility traditionally to the anti colonial national liberation. Why there's an enduring blindness when it comes to the land struggles of people in the third world. And of course, there's a blindness and this interest in, of course, was radical post Cold War distribution of land which occurred in the list of absolutely zero interest in some part of the radical Marxist question. So, you know, these things move in both directions simultaneously. What we need to do is we need to grab hold of it and say, okay, we want to build up our struggles. Yes, land is essential. Yes, ecology is essential. Yes, the agrarian question is essential. But all of these questions need to be inserted into a framework where we're also continuing to defend national civil liberation as a conduit to North South developmental convergence so that the politics of it don't escape our hands like water. So, Jason, I'm just going to let you in very soon. But I think Max, you have to leave not so late. So we enable to take questions as well. We should be trying to wrap it up. Yeah, so do you want me to respond to the land thing as well? Is that what you're asking? Yes. Okay, yeah, gladly. So, look, I think that there's a blind spot, I think, actually in an existing climate discourse. And that's it. Well, there are several, of course, we have to actively scale down fossil fuels, okay, cap fossil fuel use and scale it down on a binding annual schedule until the industry is virtually destroyed by the middle of the century, right? But of course, fossil fuels only account for 75% of total emissions. The rest is effectively from land. Now, and this is under conditions of industrial agriculture, almost all of it controlled by corporations. What has not yet entered our discourse is the fact that in order to reduce emissions from land use, there has to be effectively agrarian reform on a mass scale, right? A shift towards regenerative methods that is attentive to local ecology, et cetera, et cetera, is not compatible with the kind of extractivism of corporate agriculture, okay? So far from agribusiness being kind of savior somehow, which is bizarrely is how they've been framed and people have swallowed that pill. Left eco-modernists included, right? Regenerative agriculture is going to be essential and that's going to require land reform, even in the global north, right? Now, but the other dimension here is that is again has to do with unequal exchange. The existing structure of monopoly in the food system has created the most extraordinary price compression on inputs in the global south in the form of land and land-based labor, right? And the result of that is a huge, again, net flow of embodied lands from south to north. So effectively, land embodied in traded goods, such as clothes, for example, and of course grains from south to north, which has been a feature actually of colonialism for the past 500 years. I mean, this is one of the most consistent features of our world economy has been the imperial appropriation of land in the global south and it remains huge today. In fact, a colleague and I recently calculated exactly how much this net drain of land is and it amounts to nearly 800 million hectares per year, right? To put that in perspective, that's twice the size of India. So imagine land twice the size of India that is devoted to producing goods for the global north year after year with no compensation, no like compensation in return. This is net of trade, okay? So that's land that could be used for growing nutritious food to feed local populations. It could be used for any number of purposes that would service human needs and ecology in the global south, and yet it's appropriated for the sake of sugar for Coca-Cola and cotton for Gap, et cetera, consumed in the global north, right? So here, too, the land question is largely driven, that is largely an effect of imperial forms of appropriation. That's what's driving ecological breakdown through land system change, which, by the way, is itself a crisis. We talk so much about the climate crisis, but we're overshooting several other planetary boundaries, which are at least as significant in terms of their concern, and land system change is one of those. In fact, one of the most serious forms of overshoot is in the form of land system change, driven again by industrial agriculture. So ending forms of imperial appropriation and achieving land reform, agrarian reform, is going to be essential to dealing with this dual crisis. And I think that that's not part of our discourse. And again, it's almost entirely lacking right now. I don't see it anywhere in existing progressive discourse on climate and ecology in the mainstream. And that's going to have to be redressed. Okay, thank you for that. I guess we could pass into the questions, and I have some questions that fall in line about the subject. So some questions from the chat is, 200 years of labor movements have barely changed the dynamics of capitalism with only decades left to deal with climate change. What hope do you have before overshoot destroys the whole system? Short answers please, sorry. Anybody would like to take that? I can jump in on that. Look, I mean, it's not entirely true that labor movements have not changed capitalism, they have. In fact, virtually every gain in terms of social outcomes or social improvements, life expectancy, infamortality, health outcomes, etc. have been achieved by labor movements and socialist movements in particular. The problem is that the labor movement in the global north achieved these gains, which increased the cost of labor in the global north. And if this was a closed system, this would have led to a collapse of capitalism. Capitalism cannot sustain itself under conditions of social justice, of rising wages and full employment. It never has and it cannot. So the effects was that they depressed wages elsewhere in the world in order to maintain the low supply price, to maintain the key mechanisms of capital accumulation, that being in the colonies or the neo-colonies. And so, and the labor movement in the global north did not recognize this or confront it adequately. And as a result, we have social democracy in the global north to the extent that it even exists anymore, which is basically a compromise between a socialist labor movements and capitalism. The only way that such a compromise can be sustained is with an imperial arrangements, which we have to reject. And so the next stage in sort of labor consciousness for global north unions is going to have to be recognizing and rejecting the imperial arrangements. And the only conclusion is that if you want to stop imperialist appropriation and cheapening, and at the same time sustain and enable decent wages in the global north, the only possibility is a post capitalist system. There's no other option, right? Either you accept the sabotage of the colonies or you accept the sabotage of the domestic working class. And right now we have something approximating both. So this has to be recognized in Dublin. Oh, very good. So I'm moving on. Can anyone address GDP or GMP, which measures lots of bad things such as environmental cleanup as growth? Well, we've already addressed this, but I think it might be interesting to maybe follow up on the question of GDP being associated with bad things as in disaster capitalism as well, but also how it's been used to justify as we were speaking about before to bypass certain things in the global south. So saying GDP growth correlates with high life expectancy. Hence, could we talk about that a little bit? Jason, you were talking about that a lot in your latest book. I thought it was very interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's actually widely recognized among economists that GDP is a bad metric of economic progress. There's nothing radical about that claim, actually. That claim has been made by people like Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and so on, and effectively liberal progressive economists. GDP basically counts the market value of commodity production, but does not count any social or ecological costs of the productive process, including the labor process, or of commodification. And socialists should be able to recognize that the labor process is exploitative, and that commodification is not something that we want. Processes of enclosure and privatization, et cetera. So look, there's this strange discourse out there that GDP is the main driver of improvements in social indicators and social well-being, et cetera. There's no theoretically robust theory, claim, argument that sustains this claim. There's no necessary relationship, of course, between aggregate commodity production, which is what GDP measures, and social outcomes. It all depends on what we're producing, education or tear gas, and whether people have access to it, right? Is the education privatized or is it publicly available? And how income from production is distributed, right? So you can imagine an economy that has high GDP per capita, but is producing things that are not useful to people in terms of their well-being, housing, for example, and where key goods are commodified and therefore not available to people, and where income is distributed very unequally, right? The USA is a great example. Life expectancy is declining in the USA, while GDP continues to grow. I mean, what kind of relationship is that? So we need to be more scientific about this, and I think this is crucial for socialists, okay? We have to recognize this kind of, the socialist dream that growth is somehow good is an abandonment of the political imagination, but also empirically just deeply problematic, right? What matters for socialists or what should matter is use values. GDP does not measure use values. It measures exchange value. So I feel that socialists of the global north need to come to terms with some of this. If they believe that more economic growth is necessary for whatever reason, then they've clearly not yet broken with the ideology of capitalism since growth is languages ideological, the logic of quantification, and the mechanisms of imperial appropriation, given that growth relies on forms of imperial appropriation. So a better socialism is possible, is all I can say, and it requires question and growth. That has to be crucial. Thanks. I have a couple of questions here that are regularly on the same subject, so I'll kind of fuse them together. I guess maybe Max, this is more, requires a critique of eco-modernism, so I will direct it towards you. So technological developments are in large part responsible for where why we are today. How do you wait being seduced by another apparently painless technological solution? And I'm adding another question with this. Degrowth requires that we give things up. How can we be encouraged to face loss of what we are used to having, especially when in the West successive generations have been told they can have it all? One of the critical myths of capitalism is resting not merely on the assumption of technological neutrality, but actually is an emphasis on technological innovation as a path to the promise. This is a very basic and foundational idea linked to going back to the industrial revolution, and then it's very deeply baked into capitalist, the fusion of technology and nationalization, rationality is what is driving this other mythological creature, social progress. Of course this by itself is very much not the case. This then gets imported in a slightly modified form into progressive thought where the assumption then becomes that technology is essentially neutral and it can easily be rested from the grasp of the capitalists who make it, implement it, design it according to their own values, according to how they perceive it fitting, reaching their own goals, and can then be repurposed as a tool of anti-systemic radical revolutionary progressive. The first task again I think is a task of kind of building up, not individually, nothing really can be accomplished individually, but building up a kind of collective ethos within organizations, unions, spaces, flora, talks. Any space that progressives are building where the assumption should be that technology, it's not to assume that technology is evil, but to say technology should justify, it should be justified, and say, okay if you are proposing some new technological arrangement for our society, then justify. Already when you've asked someone to justify, you've pushed fairly far back extensively against so many of the kind of knee-jerk ideological formulations that justify the imposition of new technology. Say, okay justify vertical funds, for example, vertical funds are very compelling disciplines, and then someone actually has to say, oh wow I'm going to have to put together technical papers and actually justify this, rather than saying okay we can just grab it from the capitalist. The reason this is a very powerful maneuver is because very frequently, overwhelmingly, these sorts of technologies cannot be adjusted. So if you run through them one by one in a serious way, not in a way that's a YouTube ad copy of a venture capitalist firm, you find these technologies in fact have no proof of concept and are not feasible and should not be the recipient of progressive energy support or legitimization. So if you look at something like vertical farms, you say okay actually you cannot, it doesn't actually make sense to build a farm that is going to require a great deal of metal and steel and energy and mirrors in order to redirect the solar energy because for one thing this is actually in traffic and reverses the traditional logic of farming which is one of gathering photos of that. For another, there's no shortage of food in the first place, there's a shortage of social power to access, right, this is intimately linked of course, Jason has been pointing out to inequality and language, right. So we actually, once you start pushing back, you get actually, you have a pedagogical moment where we can actually have a discussion, okay, there is no problem of production of food, this is pure, this is a Nathusian nonsense, right, there's a problem of power, that's an example. And another example is a widespread discussion including the speckled like acid onto the brains of leftists by a variety of progressive presses considering carbon capture and storage. Carbon capture and storage is not currently feasible at scale by any means. Carbon capture and storage is a way for oil companies to continue polluting, continue burning their fixed assets, and thereby allowing them to postpone what probably will be the eventual devaluation of those assets. If in fact there wants to be, if they decide there should be some form of stopping of foreign carbon dioxide. And finally is allowing for the construction of models which allow for a postponement of the arrival at zero emissions. So it actually is a service to them. And so again, once, once we carry out the technical test of saying justify this idea of carbon capture and storage, you see one very quickly it cannot be actually this idea that we should use a massive amount of inherently limited energy to actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere instead of actually carrying out immediate technological transition of our energy systems to renewable energy. This by itself is a very foolhardy idea that's being aggressively pushed by the oil companies and of course by people who fancy themselves as progressives writing in places like the New York Republic, imperialist outlet, not exactly a spinnable tradition as progressives. You can wonder why exactly this is the case and you might understand that the confusion that we talk about within the progressive left is actually an artifact of a conscious process of capitalist-oriented ideological disorganization, highly popular, right, that people call themselves progressives. This bracket this. But the point is that once we actually dismantle the technical mythology surrounding these sorts of technologies, we then take the further step, right, being in a position to say, actually, no, why are we discussing that instead of discussing the immediate popular deployment of renewable technology on an equitable north-south basis towards immediate, immediate developmental converges in terms of per capita energy justify why we're not doing that. And then what are people going to say? Well, we don't feel like living in a just world. Okay. Well, we have different agendas. I want to live in a just world. You don't. Maybe we're not on the same side actually. Okay. Thank you so much. I'm looking at the time. So I guess we should be wrapping up because Max, you need to leave, right? So there's more questions, but would you have time for one more or what do you think? We can go to halfway through the hour. Okay. So as a follow-up to that, do you think there could be if, since science and so science in general, but more specifically in the context of the climate crisis, it always ends up mirroring the needs of capital because it's the financing financing process and hence the production process of science is captured within the capitalist infrastructure. Do you guys think there is a hope for a people science approach, a fund to help, a fund to maybe help peoples of the global south or people in general to have access to technologies, technology production that can address their needs in the context of the climate crisis? Yeah. I guess I'll just very briefly say a couple of things. First is the majority of the technologies we need for the transition are already available. The innovation is, of course, necessary. Innovation is driven, by the way, by human beings. It's not driven by capitalism. Capitalism simply tends to organize innovation around the interests of capital accumulation and appropriate the yields of innovation through IP laws. The question of innovation is not actually a problem here. It's simply a problem of access to innovation and what are we innovating for? I think this is kind of what you're after with the question of a people science. The first step towards that, I think, is a radical reconsideration of IP laws. At minimum, I think it's abundantly clear to everybody, barring maybe Bill Gates, that the vaccine debacle must be resolved through an immediate suspension of all IP rules that preclude developing countries, global south countries, apologies, from accessing essential medicines. This has been clear for decades ever since the AIDS crisis began. That's essential. The same thing is true for technologies related to renewable transition. It will not be long before this becomes a severe pinch point when it comes to the question of renewable deployments, is patent licensing. That's got to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. At minimum, I think that these core technologies have to be decmodified from that perspective. Yeah, I guess I'll hand it over to Max since he's in your hands. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think a people's technology has actually emerged in various forms over the last 70 years. The first thing to mention about people's technology is that, of course, the state has said technologies are coming from the people. Research, even in a period of this country like the US is publicly funded, is carried out by scientists. It's not carried out by primarily working in public research institutions. It's the same north and south. Now, there's a problem of people's technology needs to be, of course, reflecting the interests of people more directly rather than capital, which means a radical reorientation of research priorities. Also, there's a north south issue. It's very acute. Two countries which have built up a remarkable domestic scientific research is, for example, and I don't mean to call them like people's republics by any means, but I think they're significant in terms of the north-south divide are Iran and China. These are countries that are being aggressively targeted by the United States in part because they have started to carry out a rupture with the northern monopoly on technology, which is a central component. I think what is perhaps even more interesting about the Chinese experience and something that is very seldom discussed is that from 1949 to 1978 China actually carried out a remarkable problem of agricultural people science that was remarkably decentralized based on village-level experimentation, the popular diffusion of knowledge, including the popular diffusion of agriculture and agroecological knowledge, and also the popular diffusion of scientific expertise, kind of popular technological knowledge based on repair of tractors and so forth, which actually fundamentally transformed the society in many ways in terms of allowing for a diffusion of this sort of people's knowledge. I think also we see a lot of people's science in various anti-systemic movements in the periphery that are seldom discussed as such. First of all agriculture is a technology, right? This is something that's always different especially. Agriculture is one of the earliest technology, the most central technology for human flourishing, right? And the agroecological movements are actually carrying out a form of people's technology. I think we also see people's technology movements across the periphery, especially in the zone of storms that are targeted by the U.S. You know if we look at Cuba, Cuba has a widespread people's technology, both high and low technology, going from agroecology to one of the most advanced biomedical installations in the global south and in some ways also paralleling if not rising above the types of biomedical technology that's available in the global zone. If you look at Kerala and across rural India, there are vibrant people's ecological, people's science movements that are part of the kind of widespread diffusion of communist consciousness in those countries. So I think of course all of these institutions, all these organizations, all these networks need to be both developed and also in the case of global south states. Of course we would like to see them move in a more pro-people socialist direction in terms of the development and diffusion of their internal technological base. But it's significant that there are lots of elements both to socialize technology and also in terms of break the north-south divide in terms of technology. I just think those gains need to be defended but also improved. Thank you. That was great. And also I mean I feel like I don't know if it would be fair to note on this but I would think so. There's also been like an assault in the last 30 years on science funding which was mostly public and now it's becoming more and more into mixed models just like anything in the neoliberal era. So I can remember the Biden on the campaign trail promising to fund research and find a cure for cancer at the same during the same speech saying what a dream unreasonable dream Medicare for all was. So I just couldn't help but address the different layers of ridiculousness that we have in sometimes understanding how we produce science. We produce technologies based on that science and who has access and can benefit on those. So that's great. Thank you so much for your replies. Would an agrarian reform towards agroecology and smaller farms necessitate a change of diets? Could cheap and mass produce beef and other meats be maintained in such reform? I think overwhelmingly the evidence points towards large reductions in northern production and consumption of meat in widespread agrarian reform and agroecological transition more than I don't think that's certain. I think it's quite likely and that is because a lot of the you can't sustainably feed cattle all these corn and other cereal crops and it's the same with chicken and pigs and so forth. They produce massive ecological harms. This is less applicable to the south although there are certain dietary transitions taking place in China around pigs and so forth that are also beginning to flood up against certain ecological issues. So of course we need to ecologically and socially modulate a widespread meat consumption. I think it's very clear and make sure that that meat consumption like everything that is produced is produced one in a way that is attentive to distributional consequences in other words socialism and the two is attentive to national and human production into the biosphere in other words ecosystems. That will accordingly I think until substantial reductions certainly of beef and poultry production and consumption in the United States in general. Probably it does not apply in the same way to the rest of the global south and I think that certainly the issue needs more research in terms of what kind of production and consumption is sustainable on a permanent basis. I encourage people to check out Ian Spoon's work who recently released a report on pastoralism that grounds the debate in the state of the art scientific research and about the differences in northern and southern meat production and consumption so people can get up to speed on the latest scientific evidence and learn for themselves about what the state of the debate is. Jason would you like to add in the last two minutes or something? On the question of beef Max is the expert there so I'm going to leave that but I did notice there was a which I can just address very briefly there was a question in the chat about how production should be organized in the socialist economy such that it would not just continue to pursue growth. I think the first thing to understand here is that when we say growth and we mean GDP growth that is a capitalist metric that measures exchange value so it's not even clear to me that a socialist economy would want to pursue GDP growth like it becomes a kind of like a real socialist economy this would be a kind of nonsensical objective why would you want to maximize exchange value which of course entails a kind of surplus value appropriation right that's not the objective we would want so what you want to do is you want to organize production around meeting human needs so you need some kind of theory of human needs for this to make any sense but there is that we know that capitalist growth depends on a couple of key features the first is it depends on a pool of unemployed labor and it depends on enclosure right the enclosure of access to basic goods that has to be somehow privatized or prevented okay um when we call for the de enclosure of the of the core social economy healthcare education housing water energy internets you know etc um and when we call for full employment or something like a basic income that would take the question of livelihoods off the table this this eliminates the very possibility of capitalism capitalism cannot sustain itself under conditions of abundance like this um and so it would lead to a massive disaccumulation of capital um and therefore growth imperatives would be eliminated from the economy because it's over accumulation of capital that leads to growth imperatives right so you hit the growth imperative from two sides one is through de enclosure and one is through disaccumulation i don't see how capitalism can function under conditions of de enclosure and disaccumulation i think that by de facto creates the conditions for an eco social economy um it's actually not rocket science right to the extent that capitalism arose through enclosure and accumulation it dies through de enclosure and disaccumulation simple as that so so in such an economy i don't think growth is a possibility as such in the capitalist sense we may however choose to increase production for the sake of meeting some specific human need or use value right which is in fact precisely what the um post-independence government governments in the global south sought to do that was their objective in the 50s 60s and 70s so that's the kind of ethic we need to retain uh versus growthism that was excellent thank you both so much for giving us like one and a half hours of your time it was i think it was i mean i hope our viewers enjoyed this as much as i did and it was really nice i am very happy with how many different points we got to hit and i think lots of blind spots um has been revealed and i hope believe this will be useful uh for our audiences thank you so much again uh jason max this has been great uh my pleasure thanks very much um so