Asad Rehman: The end of imperialism in a radical green new deal (ep378)
“Our economies globally have forced the Global South to be commodity-driven, export countries, with powerful multinationals. [The] profits that come from the exploitation of countries in the Global South flow to the Global North. As I say, imperialism is as alive today as it was then.”
In this episode, we welcome Asad Rehman, the Executive Director of the radical anti-poverty and social justice organisation War on Want.
Asad is a leading climate justice activist whose work has helped to reframe the climate crisis as a crisis of neoliberal capitalism, inequality, and racism. Asad has led climate justice groups inside the UNFCCC process, and was co-founder of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, is currently coordinator of the Global Green New Deal Project and was also one of the founders of the COP26 Coalition. Over the last 35 years, he has worked with many social movements both globally and nationally including the anti-racist movement, the alter-globalisation movement, and the anti-war movement.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the historical making of the Global North and the Global South, the roles and limitations of global climate conferences, the need for more than monetary reparations in a radical green new deal for community and planetary healing, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Forest Veil
Episode-inspired artwork by Carolina Altavilla
Episode references:
““Climate Apartheid”: Pakistan, Contributing Less Than 1% of Global Emissions, Ravaged by Floods”, an interview with Asad Rehman
“Asad Rehman: Climate Crisis and Global Injustice Must Be Overcome Simultaneously”, an interview with Asad Rehman
Revolutionary Suicide, a book by Huey P. Newton
Less is More, a book by Jason Hickel
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Asad Rehman: I was born in Pakistan. I came to the UK along with my parents, and I grew up in a working-class town in the north of England. And like many people in the Black community, both Asian and the African Caribbean community, our experiences in the seventies and eighties was, and in fact, a decade later [still is], of intense racial violence and indifference from the state or out and out violence from police, and going through the school system and basically facing daily attacks on us in the schools, on our way to school, in our homes. Our homes used to be firebombed, graffitied with racist graffiti.
Looking up as a child and seeing races terrorizing our community, particularly for first-generation migrants [with families in which] the men [would] go to work, the women would be home, [and] didn't speak English as their first language, [thus] very vulnerable and targeted, from an early age, that made me aware, trying to understand why we are subject to such racist abuse, and also to understand my own story and the story of Black people. In trying to respond to all of these racist slurs, [I tried] to actually learn a little bit more about the history of African civilizations and Asian civilizations, of our struggles. And that really instilled in me the core of my belief, which was around justice.
For many migrant families, the only way you could survive in that period was not that I, it was the we.
So a sense of community was very powerful. As a community we stood together, we helped each other through difficult times. As a teenager, I then helped set up a movement called the Asian Youth Movement, which was a youth movement that had been set up in response to racist violence and [we had] a slogan Here to Stay, Here to Fight, which was in an expression that we were not going anywhere and we were going to fight for our rights—[including] the right to live free from attack. I suppose that began my political journey. But it was a political journey that was not just about what was happening to us as a community, but a sort of political awareness and consciousness. Many people, I suppose, with that experience, started joining the dots.
I'd look at what was happening on the television screens in South Africa, or in Palestine and all around the world. Why is it that people who are called black- or brown-skinned, their lives don't seem to have the same value? Why is it we are left without? And yet there's incredible wealth in these rich countries. Is it because they were somehow better than us? And then you understand that actually the wealth of the Global North, is because of its exploitation of both people and resources of the Global South. So it began a very subtle political journey for me, but [it was one that was] always rooted first in community struggle and community resistance.
Kamea Chayne: I can see how personal and deeply rooted this advocacy and activism work has been for you. So I appreciate you offering this glimpse into your background.
I don't think we can understand the present-day picture without digging up and revealing some historical context that helps us to better understand the foundations shaping our social fabric and how things function today.
And with you, I'm particularly interested in exploring the legacy of imperialism. I am aware that history is unique to every community and every region but there are some key themes we can highlight in terms of the power dynamics at play and the trajectory of the broad impacts of imperialism at large.
So, I wonder if you could lay the grounds here by sharing an overview of the creation of the unjust dynamic of the Global North and the Global South today which continues to systemically aggravate poverty for many communities, due to the legacy of imperialism at the global scale sort of reconfiguring a lot of place-based relations and leaving many countries now reliant on exporting commodities through resource extraction, in order to keep up amidst the pressures of economic globalization.
Asad Rehman: Absolutely we must understand the journey, [and how] we get here. I would say that that predates even imperialism. We could go all the way back and [ask], what are the foundations of this [combination of both] race and capital together?
[You could say] it was the doctrine of discovery, when you the kings and queens of Europe, and the Vatican church's Pope said, that those [who were] Black or Brown or Indigenous had no value, that their land could be taken from them, that they could be sold to slaves, they could be exploited. It was an attempt to justify, of course, everything from that moment, from slavery. And it's such a profound moment because that's the story that the Global North told itself, and particularly Europe, that it was exploring new frontiers, discovering what would [otherwise be] lost, bringing civilization.
What we saw was that the Global North was expropriating this incredible wealth and justifying it by using frames of racism. Some would say this is the development of racialised capitalism and is the cornerstone of Western civilization. Interestingly, at the very moment, we have the Enlightenment, in the Global North in Europe—talking about human rights and civil liberties and the rights of man—you have enslavement of people. And this the only way people in Europe [could] make sense of that. To say there are people who are less than human. That becomes a profound reality.
In the case of the UK, the Industrial Revolution would never have happened without slavery. It was the profits of slavery, slave products which built the universities, that financed the inventions, the canals, the banks like Barclays Bank, the Bank of England; their immense profits were made enriched Britain, which then allowed it to begin its colonial expansion all around the world. And that colonial expansion wasn't just simply the acquiring of new territory. It was exploitation of both the people and its resources, to send wealth back to the North. Somebody did a study of just Britain's role in the Indian subcontinent.
When the British went to India, it had a share of global GDP of 24%, [and] when they left, it was about 4%. They'd taken £45 trillion out of India. It's said that Britain never financed a war from its own coffers—it was the profits from its colonial exploitation.
So this is really profound because what it does is it creates the world as we know it, and then that, as the anti-colonial struggles of the forties, fifties and sixties begin to challenge it. We see this period which is often called the rise of anti-imperialism or anti-imperialist movements where you have very, very powerful movements of people in the Global South, not simply saying we want to get rid of the colonial masters and regimes, but of the power of European multinationals that were still controlling the economies. So no longer did you need guns and rifles and gunboats. You could control economies by the power of global capital, by trade rules, by limiting the ability of countries to determine their own destiny. Many leaders who had risen up and who challenged that imperialist logic, of course, were then either brutally overthrown, coups, military dictators, plotting.
Often when we think about the injustices of the past, they are not just some historical facts. Their legacy continues today and it continues today in the vulnerabilities that we see in the Global South, in the wealth extraction of the Global South. People will talk about [how] it was a hundred years, when [the] European powers were looting the countries of the Global South. But, if you look at it even today, $2 trillion annually flows, in net flows, from the Global South to the Global North. Walter Rodney, the revolutionary and writer, wrote a seminal book about how Europe underdeveloped Africa, and it was a deliberate strategy of not just underdevelopment, but fundamentally about controlling of resources.
And we see that today with unsustainable debt repayments, illicit capital flows, corporations taking profits out of the Global South and bringing it back to the banks and corporations in the Global North. So in reality, this logic of racialized capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, is still apparent today. And it's the same logic.
The Global South, its people and its resources have developed the Global North and created this unjust, unequal world, and baked into that system of inequity, is this logic of sacrificing the Global South in the interest of profit.
Now, that logic, I think, has been as fueled, by neoliberalism, the dominant economic model that we've had since the 1970s.
Kamea Chayne: Global context shows that arguably there has been no net increase in wealth overall, as broadly as we want to define wealth, but more of shifting around of and a reconfiguration of wealth and "resources".
Something that I'm still struggling to comprehend is the uneven exchange, which generally speaks to how due to the differentials in currency exchanges, for example, one hour of minimum wage labor in the United States could be worth ten hours or even days of minimum wage labor in a "developing" country, just due to how one currency converts unevenly into another. So, in the big picture, what this means is that the fruits of labor and the products of resource extraction are disproportionately being sucked out of communities in the Global South into the hands of multinational corporations and communities in the Global North.
And so, as well-intentioned as a lot of more progressive companies are today, including ones that label themselves as regenerative while being reliant on this uneven exchange to produce their products, to me, even if they pay living wages or above-market prices in these regions for their resources and labor, it cannot be considered wholly regenerative because of the underlying dynamics that have been set up to make this a one-way, monodirectional relation that may seem like reciprocity but only because the "fair trade" exists within an uneven context.
I'm not sure this is your specific focus per se, though I feel like this currency differential is somewhat integral to the continuation of global injustice. I'd be curious what else you would want to bring in here to help us better understand how this works, why these differentials exist, and why this dynamic of constant indebtedness persists in a systemic way.
Asad Rehman: I think there are two things to be firstly said, which is, there has been an attempt, and it's been largely led by international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, to create a narrative that over the last 30, 40 years, that somehow because of development or global globalization, we've seen a reduction in poverty and inequality in the Global South. This is the classic trickle-down. [They say,] yes, there are unequal rates. But in time, the countries of the Global South will have the means to be able to develop and will become economic powers in themselves.
That illusion is only possible if you accept the starting point being that people in the Global South's level of poverty, in relation to poverty in the Global North, is such that you measure it only in enough calories that they can survive a day. So they point to poverty falling because the number of people surviving on on the equivalent of $1.90 is reducing. But actually the real poverty rate is about $5.50. That's not living—that's just having enough to be able to feed your family. You would need a poverty rate of the equivalent of $10 a day, if you wanted somebody to not live in poverty. You need about $15 a day to be able to live with basic dignity. This is not at the level of consumption of the Global North. It's simply enough that you would be able to feed your family, heat your home, your children would be able to go to school, and you'd be able to afford at least some basic medical attention, etc.
Now, three and a half billion people in the world are surviving on the equivalent of less than $5.50. And I say the equivalent because it's not $5.50 that they live on. The equivalent is what is the purchasing power of $5.50 in the United States. So you tell me, what can $5.50 buy you in the United States? That's the purchasing power that is deemed to be the level of poverty in the Global South. The same three and a half billion people, are the ones without access to electricity or clean cooking. The same three and a half million people don't have access to public services.
This has never been a question that either there has not been enough wealth generated from any individual country, or that there has somehow not been the desire, the demand, or the ingenuity by the peoples of the Global South wanting those. In fact, most of the struggles of the seventies all the way through to the current time, has been movements of people in the Global South demanding that, both of their own countries, of their own governments, and especially in terms of recognizing that their governments were unable to deliver this because the surplus profit that was being made, from whether it is their resources, or exploitation of their cheap labor, wasn't remaining in the country—it was being siphoned off.
And that's through the creation of very unfair trade rules, which were a hallmark of globalization, of neoliberalism, as we would say, forced privatizations in the Global South or liberalizing the economy.
When we talk about liberalizing the economy, we're not talking about liberalizing trade, to make trade happen better between countries. It was to enable what were already very powerful institutions, such as corporations that had enriched themselves, to continue to hold and be powerful actors in those economies and to then take the profits out.
And this is not that we've got now a global system where many corporations don't pay taxes in those individual countries. It's the fact that this is all legal. This is legally done.
We've created both a global tax system, a global trade system, and then a punitive system managed by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO, which punishes countries if they challenge that logic, and if they, for example, decide to prioritize their own people. Now, often, when we talk about unsustainable debt, for example, which, since 1980, $4 and a half trillion has been paid by the Global South to private banks and governments in the Global North. And you can see the reality of that as a continuum, just by thinking about what's happening in Pakistan.
So in Pakistan, as we know, 33 million people have been displaced by a climate flood—when they are responsible for less than 1% of global emissions. It's largely the emissions of the Global North, about 85% of all the carbon that's in the atmosphere. But Pakistan, for every $100 that the Government raises in tax revenue, it pays 83 of those, rupees, back out in debt repayments. And what you've seen increasingly is country after country being trapped in this cycle of needing to beg for more debt-creating loans to pay the last debt-creating loans, and each of those loans coming with conditions.
Recently, Sri Lanka was unable to pay its debt. There have been huge protests on the streets of Sri Lanka, by movements, as people were unable to afford food, even kerosene to cook with, petrol for their motorbikes. People were unable to get to the hospital. The government was telling people to eat less, not to eat three meals a day. [There was] a huge uprising of people and the government that was in power fled; the new government, which was imposed in Sri Lanka, went to the IMF and said, we want to negotiate restructuring our loan, because once you default on your loan, [because of] the way our economic system is set up, you will be punished. Because every bank, every corporation, wants their debt repayments. So people are forced to go back to the IMF.
And the IMF told Sri Lanka, we will give you another loan, if you do three things: you cut your public expenditure—so the very money that you need on public services—second, you weaken your labor laws—[they] don't want unions being strong in [Sri Lanka]—and thirdly, you have to privatize what's left of your utility. Which were operating for the interests of the Sri Lankan people. They want them now to be put onto the open market and, like many countries in the Global South, the main drivers of our economy, are actually not in the hands of either our governments or our peoples, they are still controlled by the same Western multinationals.
Now, if we had a picture, if we could show two maps, we could show a map of the colonial world and the influence of the different countries of Europe on the different parts of the world, and the commodities that were drawn from those countries, to feed back to supply chains, to feed consumption and the industrial processes in the Global North. But if you did the same map right now, you'd see the exact same commodities flowing from the Global South to the Global North, because countries were forced to and [told,] you will provide and produce this commodity because we want it, not because it's needed by your people, or it's something that you should be growing. It's because you will grow cotton, you will grow coffee, you'll export oil, you will do this, and our economies globally have forced the Global South to be commodity-driven, export countries, with powerful multinationals.
[The] profits that come from the exploitation of countries in the Global South flow to the Global North.
As I say, imperialism is as alive today as it was then. This is the cycle, I think, which the people of the Global South find themselves in. And those inequalities and injustices each and every year increase. The number of people being trapped in poverty increases. And we see the reality of that every time there is a manifestation of a crisis, because that vulnerability has now been built into the lives, the countries, our institutions of the Global South.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so the historic processes really have solidified these vicious cycles of further and further disempowerment that continue into the present. And the extractive dynamics never ended. They've just maybe taken on more euphemistic names and forms, but they very much are still alive with us.
I know you've personally been engaged with the ongoing climate conferences and Conference of the Parties, also known in abbreviated terms as things like COP21 in Paris, COP26 which happened in late 2021 in Glasgow, and so on. What have been some of your experiences and frustrations from this form of political engagement as you keep your focus on climate justice and reparations front and center? And also, what comes to mind for you as you consider this idea of the medium as the message, and how these conferences are set up, what form they take, where and what types of settings they usually take place, and whose voices they prop up or sideline or altogether leave out?
Asad Rehman: The climate negotiations are a fascinating place to be in. I always say to people who first come to these summits, that the last thing that these summits are actually discussing is climate.
What they're really discussing [at climate negotiations] is the political economy.
It's who will be dominant in the political economy, whose interests will be protected and whose won't, whose lives will be sacrificed and whose won't. This really became absolutely apparent in 2009, when the very infamous Copenhagen climate talks took place.
President Obama had just been elected, he got a Nobel Peace Prize simply for coming to the climate summit after George Bush, and governments in the Global North were applauding themselves as being the climate leaders. But many countries in the Global South, came to that summit saying [that] the climate crisis is much worse than you think it is, because it's already impacting us. This is not about something that will happen way off in the future, to your children's children or your grandchildren's children. This is already impacting the lives of our citizens, in both extreme weather impacts and how it's affecting our food production, in the displacement of people, in economic losses.
And those of us who stood on the side of climate justice—and climate justice as a word has, now, I would say, been co-opted quite a lot and stripped of quite a lot of its meaning, but climate justice was developed by movements in the Global South as a way to understand the climate crisis, not simply as an abstract thing of extreme weather or carbon, but an understanding that the climate crisis was a manifestation of a systemic crisis that was playing out in a number of different ways. Countries of the Global South and movements of the Global South called for temperatures to be limited to well below one degree, and countries of the Global North, led by the European Union, the United States, Canada, Australia—see a pattern of the colonial powers of the world?—argued very vociferously for a target of two degrees being a safe level.
Actually, there was never a [scientific] basis that two degrees was a safe level. It was purely an economic target.
It was created and decided as a target because of a study that was done, that the impact on the global economy and particularly on the GDP of rich countries, would be negligible at two degrees, and would be manageable. And now, when you look around the world at this moment, you see 55 million people on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, you see what's happening in Pakistan, you see the devastation in Puerto Rico—this is the warming [of] just over one degree. And what they wanted is double this amount of warming.
To me, at that very moment, it became absolutely clear that what we were fighting here in this climate summit was not a question about simply about reducing carbon. It was about reducing injustices. And that the only way we were going to be able to do that was to be able to really understand both the inequitable consumption, but also the inequitable responsibility of the Global North, and to drive both of those things forward, in terms of both rich countries doing their fair share and cutting their emissions, but also recognizing that they have a legal and moral responsibility to be able to help the countries of the Global South, who were being overwhelmed by the devastation that their actions, that their companies caused.
What I found really interesting at that moment was that the mainstream environmental movement, all of what I would call the big brand NGOs were all sided with the European Union and the United States, at two degrees. And all the movements of color and people were all saying, you're sacrificing us. What is this two degrees? And I still remember the chair of the then G77, Ambassador Lumumba of South Sudan—he sat there and tears were rolling down his eyes and he said, you are shoveling my people, the people of Africa, into genocide. And the money you're putting on the table is not even enough to pay for their coffins, I refuse to accept this. And the mainstream media and politicians and NGOs [responded with]: How dare he say that? [How dare he say] that this is a deliberate attempt at genocide of people of the Global South? To me, that was a very pertinent and insightful understanding of actually what was taking place.
One of the problems of the time of climate change is [that] it's a global problem. It's a problem of the global commons. No one country can solve it. So you do need a global agreement, and you do therefore need COPs, or the UN summits. The problem is not the summit itself—the problem fundamentally, is the question of power. That you could have 195 countries of the Global South all saying one thing, but if the five, six richest countries in the world in the Global North refuse, then there is no way that that can be passed. And one of the most powerful countries in the negotiations is the United States.
And what the United States basically says, [is that] these are my red lines. And those red lines are followed. It's not that the majority of countries can overrule the United States. The United States says, I don't want to take liability for climate damages. The UNFCCC says, okay, there will be no liability for climate damages. They say we're not going to cut our emissions equitably or fairly, we want a global goal that everybody does. The UNFCCC says, okay, that's what we'll do. They say, we don't like these legally binding targets, scientifically determined. Then it's said, okay, we'll create a Paris agreement, which is purely voluntary. You do what you can, however much you want to do. There's no legal mechanism that holds these rich countries responsible if they are breaching their fair share of effort.
And their fair share of effort, is that they would not just only need to be decarbonizing by 2030 to allow countries in the Global South some time to be able to decarbonize, because they obviously don't have the same amount of resources and technology, and that they need some space for development, that they need to be able to grow their economies. The rich countries are saying that's not our responsibility. We want to be treated exactly as you are. We will decarbonize in 30 years' time, when we'll have temperatures probably heading towards close to three degrees warming.
The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, he said, what we've created now is a system of climate apartheid, where the rich will use that wealth to seek safety and they'll leave the poor to burn or drown. And that's, for me, the thread that links where are in this climate discussion way back to that doctrine of discovery.
It's the same logic of saying there are parts of the world and there are people whose lives are not intrinsically of value and that we can negotiate and decide that they can be sacrificed.
Kamea Chayne: Something that concerns me is how much hope a lot of people put into these conferences alone, as I personally used to as well, as the sites where radical, just transformation will be envisioned and will be led. Part of my concern has come from my personal belief in people power, in community power, and in bottom-up composting, rather than top-down and imposed changes.
I know activists like Dr. Camila Moreno and independent journalists like Whitney Webb have also pointed out their concerns with how these global climate agendas have been co-opted to serve the neoliberal values and goals of financializing and commodifying more parts of the planet and their elements and resources in the name of regulation and conservation. There's a lot more that I'd love to dive into with you later as well like how the proposed climate solutions typically focus on just the source of energy without an analysis of power and justice.
But, the thing I want to unpack here is the fact that these conferences focus on convening primarily the political leaders of nation-state institutions. And so the negotiations mostly take place between the representatives of nation-state governments, which cannot properly account for the injustices within most nation-states in the world, from the Global South to the Global North, where any gains from commodity markets even in the Global South tend to go into the hands of a few, often beyond those borders, and where additional gains from 'development' in the Global North also continue to disproportionately benefit a few. And so, with these acknowledgements, it does make me question how we can address these deeper layers of injustice, and whether there is even room to do so at these global convenings that recognize and prop up nation-state institutions as the most valid form of governance and social organizing?
Asad Rehman: I agree. The question I think we face as movements is, we're trying to change two things at the same time. We are battling at a local and national level to reimagine our states, so that our states serve the interests of its people rather than elites or global capital. And at the same time, there is a struggle between those states at a global level, between the Global South and the Global North. So many activists find themselves, in these spaces, trying to stand with a broader perspective, of the anticolonial perspective about the Global South and the Global North, whilst back home being the very people who are being persecuted by their own state, and in conflict with their own state, because their state is...
I think, being honest with ourselves, we don't really have a country at this moment that we can stand proud and say, yes, here's a country which actually serves its people. Potentially, Colombia may very well be that example because the power of social movements in Colombia, uniting Afro-Colombians, human rights, environmentalists, trade unionist, feminists have built a movement of movements. And movement leaders have come up through that and have got a radical political agenda and have been elected. Now, there will be a question [of whether or not] they [are] able to fulfill the political agenda that the people want. But these examples are very rare and far between, at this moment.
We do have a challenge that our own countries of the Global South are not the anti-imperialist leaders that they were in the 1970s.
They're not the non-aligned movement. They don't come with that radical perspective. They've now come saying that the one thing that is not possible to change is global capital or the neoliberal system, that we have to work within this system, and what working within that system simply means for them is finding the best deal possible, and often those best deals possible also still continue to mean that large parts of their own citizens are being sacrificed. They have short-term objectives. They don't have these long-term, radical objectives.
I still think that the COP plays an important and interesting role, because purely in abstract terms, if we were sitting and designing a global space, we would say this meeting should take place every year, it should not be delayed, in five years. It shouldn't be housed in a rich country in the Global North, like the WTO, or the IMF and the World Bank, between Geneva and New York or Washington—it should move, and be hosted by Global South countries as well. You would say every country should be there, civil society should be there. So all of those things are there. It's not a perfect system, but it's interesting that the elements are there.
From my analysis, the weakness is our power. And that is an honest reflection, and we should be honest, that as movements we are not strong enough, in our own countries, and we're not strong enough collectively at the global level yet. There are many reasons why that has happened, but it is just the material reality. And if we want to change the COP, we have to think first and foremost, how do we build power? And then how do we use that power to get these international spaces, multilateral spaces, to deliver what we want to happen? There has been a moment in our history where that came close to happening—the anti-globalization movement, in 1999 against the WTO did have this global dimension, did have movements from Via Campesina to trade unions, to environmentalists, who were challenging this logic of capital, and were taking to the streets and really had the global institutions on the back foot.
There was a real opportunity and a possibility that actually, instead of the globalization agenda that we saw being imposed, that that could radically be altered and the spaces could be developed, that countries in the Global South could determine a very, very different development pathway than the maldevelopment pathway that has been imposed on them. But, we were not powerful enough. So, thinking as somebody who both tries to build movements on the outside as well as, taking the demands of our movements inside those processes, and thinking about how we leverage what we have to shape narratives, I would say that I see the UNFCCC as being a defensive strategy.
We're trying to stop them from doing more harm—not no harm, because they're already doing harm.
If we weren't [at things like COP], many of the things that they wanted to do would already be enacted, the primacy of the market, financialization of everything, systems that would deepen further, impoverish the Global South.
We were able to slow those things down, whilst at the same time recognizing that that will never deliver the outcome, until we have built the kind of movements that are themselves transformative, [during which we] could then transform our nation-state or whatever political entity we want to build, and that that political identity would be accountable to its citizens, rather than to all of these other economic interests.
Kamea Chayne: We certainly need people creating cracks and openings in every space, in a sort of all of the above kind of way.
It's been beautiful and moving to see the growth of the movements fighting for reparations, whether climate reparations or reparations for stolen land or stolen labor, and rightfully so, if people are genuinely interested in disrupting cycles of harm and healing extractive and exploitive relations. As we continue to support these movements, I've also been thinking about how reparations ought to involve more than demanding economic returns.
Because ultimately, for me those monetary currencies are representational of a huge diversity of currencies of life that have been commodified, reduced, and extracted, and also complex, relational community fabrics founded on trust that have been ripped apart and commercialized and turned transactional. And, I name this not to place the onus of healing on communities who have been devastated by global colonial capitalism and corporate monopolization, or those who wish to stand in solidarity with these communities, but actually and hopefully as a way of recognizing our abilities to reclaim power and rebuild community from the bottom up, in all of these ways that cannot be replaced nor bought simply by money, while continuing to fight relentlessly for economic reparations from nation-state governments and extractive corporations.
As you've centered so much of your advocacy work on a radical green new deal that addresses global injustice and poverty, how have you contemplated what it might mean or take to heal communities with and beyond monetary reparations? Because so long as all types of relationships, between people and with our more-than-human-world and the un-commodifiable networks of trust and mutual aid continue to erode, I fear that this one form of reparations will not suffice nor be enough to catch up to the ongoing and forced unraveling of place-based communities and ecosystems.
Asad Rehman: I think you're absolutely right. It won't be. It's a legitimate demand to be made, because we know that just on a very practical level, when harm is done to our communities, that vulnerability is between 11 to 14 times more than citizens of the Global North, because they've been deprived of very basic essentials that the state could provide, that would make a material difference in their lives. And so resources through reparations are important, because the reality of climate violence is that it's here, and it's immense, and it's overwhelming communities. And they need every measure of support that they can have.
But that's not the whole story. So there is, of course, in reparations, as you said—it's not simply about monetary—the notion of reparations is also about not doing any more harm, about repairing the harm that you're doing. So it asks the question of the Global North and of corporations and the elites around the world, that is not simply answered by the slogan Polluter Pays, which I think is very transactional.
[The idea with Polluter Pays is] as long as I pay, I can carry on polluting or I can do these damages. That somehow you can quantify damage, as if you can quantify the loss of community, people, identity, culture, belonging. You just can't.
And that's why, when people try and calculate the cost of climate violence, you run into real problems. Because what are you trying to put a value to? Many things are priceless. They don't have a monetary value, but they're incredibly important, they have value in themselves.
But when we began working on the idea of a radical global Green New Deal, which was a challenge both to the frames of the vision that the Global North had for its just transition—largely reproducing the same exploitation and extractivist logic, but now doing it in the name of being green—and the progressives in the Global North, whose response to the climate crisis had been to take on board [an interesting] political vision. Movements in the Global South and climate justice movements had long argued that understanding climate was understanding not just climate as an injustice in itself, but that it fueled all of the other existing inequalities and injustices, and that solving climate was not possible without also, simultaneously, not as an add-on or as a nice thing, but simultaneously recognizing that that meant tackling economic injustice, racism, patriarchy, etc. These were the systems that created the climate crisis in the first place.
Progressives sort of took on some of that language, but they did an interesting thing. They retreated to the nation-state, particularly in the Global North, and were talking about transitioning their own societies, often with laudable aims: wanting people to live with dignity, living wages, housing, but they would not consider the footprint of their own country on the rest of the Global South, or the unequal exchange that happens between the Global South and the Global North... [They failed to consider] that the resources from the South are the ones that allow the Global North to be able to even begin a different kind of economy, and a just transition. So that led many of us in discussions with our movements to [ask] what would be the pillars of our vision of a radical global Green New Deal?
And we said, we know from what the science has told us, reaching the 1.5 and triggering the tipping points is absolutely catastrophic for our people in the Global South. No temperature level is safe. It is devastating and deadly for many, many people, but we know that at this point, things will spiral and get even worse. And the scale and severity of these impacts on our people mean that having an equitable response to the climate crisis is important, so fair shares, each country doing what it needs to do, based on this responsibility. That led us to a very different conversation, because it no longer leads to a conversation of [the fact that] energy should be [switched from] fossil fuels to renewables.
It actually lends itself to a bigger conversation, [like] what is the purpose of energy, what is productive energy, what is socially useful energy, how much energy should we have, how is it shared and distributed, and what kind of economy do you want to have? What kind of society do you want to have? It's a much more profound understanding of the solutions. Similarly, with food—the control of our global food systems by industrial agribusiness means that [even though] something like close to 80% of people are fed by small farms, they only occupy between 19 and 23% of all the land. The rest of agricultural land is given over to producing commodities—whether it's soy or etc.
But secondly, when you start to apply that and say we've also got an imperative to tackle global inequality, to allow people to be able to live in dignity, you begin to talk about the very demands that people in our movements have been making for decades—the rights to public services, health, education, housing, challenging the idea that these things were goods, that were dependent on your ability to be able to pay, rather than being fundamentals of [existence] and therefore should be provided. You're on a very different pathway when you start bringing those two things together.
And the third thing, and this is was really important from particularly from both an indigenous perspective and from understanding [that] our ecosystems are not abstract to who we are, we're not separate as human beings, from the planet which we live—the ecosystems support all the functions that we rely on, for food, our health, the economy, housing. And it's not just [that] we've got a climate crisis, [but that] we've got a crisis of reaching close to five now, of our planetary limits. [This] again, challenges the very fundamental idea of the last 500 years, which is [that] development comes through the expansion of our economy and profit accumulation, and then somehow that trickles down and you get the development of a globalized economy. Planetary limits put a hard question on that, and it begins to force people to think about our economy in a very, very different way.
[A radical global green new deal forces people to think] about sufficiency, which are traditions that are deep in the Global South.
Ubuntu in the continent of Africa or living well—these are all concepts that now people in the Global North talk a little bit about, but [they were] the fundamental foundations of a very different vision of society, and our economy and how we would, as people, connect with ourselves and with nature.
The fourth element, again largely ignored in the Global North, was none of these were possible without recognizing that the world we've created was based on these unjust systems that had been baked into the political economic system, and that until you uprooted those, you would never be able to actually have or be able to realize any of these other demands. [Some people would] say well, basically what you're saying is end capital. And we said yes, absolutely it's incompatible. The mainstream climate scientists would say exactly the same thing, saying climate change is the biggest failure of the free market. Free market capital doesn't have the answers to it, which is why for the last 40 years we've not seen a reduction in emissions, but an increase in emissions.
The recent IPCC report, which is the International Panel on Climate Change, the world's climate scientists, in their report on on climate impacts, vulnerability and adaptation, they'veu actually begun to spell out, and say, it's not possible to tackle climate without also tackling poverty, inequality. They talk about what this vulnerability actually means—and they say the vulnerability is expressly linked with the fact that people are denied things like the right to housing, health, education, public services, and they say that the reason why these are denied is because we have got systems, and they actually use the word colonialism. They'll say that the legacy of colonialism and the unjust systems that came out of colonialism are the main reasons why you have this inequity between experiences in the Global South, and in the Global North to the same extreme weather patterns.
And that is, I think in one sense, a glimmer of hope that, what has largely been narratives of the Global South are now finally finding spaces in the Global North because people are no longer able to, like they have done for the last hundred years, ignore the exploitative nature of capital because they had some benefit from it, even if it was crumbs. They're now faced with a world where actually much of what's happening in the Global South is also happening in the Global North and two very similar communities, the poorest community, Black communities, working-class people. That creates the opportunity, I think, for a new vision of solidarity, of internationalism, of anti-imperialism, which has been sadly missing, in these last two or three decades—it's been really weakened.
We're in a moment where we can once again begin to dream and envision something different.
Neoliberalism's greatest victory on [us] is the fact that it took away people's ability to imagine anything different. They told everybody there was nothing before the market. There is nothing after the market. The market is the only thing. And now people are coming to the conclusion, [that] there is something after the market. There must be if we want to survive.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Asad Rehman: I found that as a working-class person, that Huey P. Newton's Revolutionary Suicide was such a powerful book for me, on the history of the Black Panthers, and spoke to me, in both my politics and my heart. More recently, I would say a book by Jason Hickel, talking about Less is More, which fundamentally starts to challenge the model of colonial and imperialist growth and takes an ecological lens, but also the lens of inequality, and brings it to this moment. It's a very useful and good book because it isn't just about critiquing the system, but it also begins to lay out a pathway on what could be different.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Asad Rehman: My motto is, there is no moment of final defeat in this. We have to measure our work into the extent of the disasters we prevent, the scale of lives of our people in the Global South. And for me, every day I get up and go, that's what we're doing. It's not that we're trying to prevent this crisis. We're trying to prevent this crisis from getting worse and worse. And it can get much, much worse.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Asad Rehman: I mentioned Colombia. The vice president, Francia Márquez, she was a young woman who was a community activist opposing extractivism in her community. And in the 1980s, she went to a political education school that my organization, together with a movement in Colombia, was organizing. And I find when I look at this person, to me, it is just immensely liberating to see a Black woman, in Colombia, a country ruled by the right, where the number of human rights defenders killed, the trade unions killed, is highest of anywhere in the world. She has helped weave together a movement of movements that has been so successful, that they're now in power. It just, again, shows, for me, that we are all absolutely critical to this fight. Our strength lies in building our collective power, having a political education and understanding and having political courage.
Kamea Chayne: Asad, thank you so much for your leadership and time with us here. It's been a huge honor for me to be able to speak with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Asad Rehman: I would say a quote, not from one of our friends, but actually from one of our enemies, the architect of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, who said, only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change. Our goal is to keep our ideas and policies alive for when the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. And we, and our vision, is the politically inevitable.
