Christian Parenti: Recognizing capital as a social relation (ep368)

Written By kamea chayne
“The idea of the catastrophic convergence essentially looks at how climate change interacts with the pre-existing crises of the legacy of US imperialism and Cold War militarism and neoliberal economic restructuring.”
— CHRISTIAN PARENTI

In this episode, we welcome Christian Parenti, a Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. His undergraduate and graduate teaching, and research, focus on: American economic history, environmental history, and the history of capitalism; climate change and sustainable energy; as well as war, policing, and political violence.

Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include what Parenti means by “big storms require big government”, viewing capital in part as social relations, various regional conflicts resulting from the "catastrophic convergence" of climate change, militarism and imperialism, and neoliberal economic restructuring, and more.

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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.

Christian Parenti: I first heard about climate change when I was 18. I had just graduated high school and moved with my girlfriend to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was from southern Vermont and painted houses and then later got a job at a homeless shelter for homeless alcoholics in Cambridge. One night, walking back from the homeless shelter, there was this box in the middle of the street, with two books in it. One was The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, and the other one was Limits to Growth. I took both these books and read them. So that's where I first heard about climate change. It was a pretty depressing, interesting issue.

I had always been interested in conflict because the world is so full of it and history is so full of it. I decided to write Tropic of Chaos, which is a book about climate change and violence. I had already published Locked Down America, which was [about] the history of the build-up of police and prisons from the sixties to the present. It was published in 1999. Then, I published The Soft Cage Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, which is a history of everyday routine surveillance, not investigations, but the infrastructure of passive monitoring of the population, with an American focus, beginning from slavery to the present and.

I had always been interested in violence as a political force. I had, since I was a little kid, wanted to be a foreign reporter. My father had a subscription to the National Guardian. Which was a Marxist left magazine that had fantastic international coverage. At around age ten, I remember the Sandinista revolution, and I wasn't able to read these articles, but I could look at the pictures and maybe read little bits of them and hear about them. The background news in my youth was of these revolutions and this radical, and often violent, process of social change.

Even before I had finished my BA, I was working as a radio journalist at a community radio station in California. Then I studied Spanish in Central America and reported from Central America as a radio journalist for the Pacifica Network a little bit. Then I left the Northeast where I'm from and went out to San Francisco, went to college, dropped out of college, moved back east, and then moved back out. There was always a back and forth.

But when I moved out to San Francisco, in 1989… This was as the crack epidemic was peaking and violence in American cities and police repression were really intense. I lived in the Mission District, which is now a rather gentrified part of an extremely gentrified city, San Francisco. But at that time, 24th and Florida Street where I lived was quite rough. I remember my lefty friends and I reaching for explanations for what was going on with gang violence and police repression.

Our explanations were, in my view, and I think in many of our views, inadequate because this was not the state repressing radical political movements. This was a crime wave and a really repressive state response that probably made the crime wave worse in many ways. So, my interest in violence and the state and forms of state power, such as surveillance and policing, was drawn back to my immediate surroundings in San Francisco. That's what led ultimately to Locked Down America.

After 9/11, when the war in Afghanistan and Iraq began, I had at that point completed a Ph.D. and I was in New York doing a series of postdocs funded by through the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, working with the late Neil Smith and David Harvey. But these wars began, and I felt compelled to go report to them. From that conflict reporting, I left academia and I was just a journalist focusing on conflict, reporting for about ten years. Amidst that, it just became evident that climate change was very clearly already a driver of this. So that's how that focus on these connections between violence and climate change developed.

Kamea Chayne: In Tropic of Chaos, you look at the environmental and climate angle of various conflicts around the globe and how they affect or help to create the conditions for the social dynamics at play. I think gaining an understanding of this historical backdrop is really important because it helps us to see these deeper roots of climate injustice and makes it very clear that we cannot disentangle environmental and climate concerns from power, violence, and war. So, I wonder if you can set the stage here for us by, first of all, clarifying what you mean when you talk about this catastrophic convergence and providing a few examples of how this has shown up differently to fuel different conflicts around the globe.

Christian Parenti:

The idea of the catastrophic convergence essentially looks at how climate change interacts with the pre-existing crises of the legacy of US imperialism and Cold War militarism and neoliberal economic restructuring.

The legacy of the Cold War and then the war on terror and primarily American-led, Western war-making has littered the Global South with weapons and primarily groups of men who know how to use weapons and have the skills of surveillance and smuggling that are useful for warfare, but also of crime and other types of social breakdown. The bad military policy of most of the post-World War II era primes the Global South for instability.

At the same time, there was, from the end of World War II until the early seventies, a commitment from the Western, American-led side of the Cold War to develop capitalism in the Global South. It's not a commitment to an egalitarian social system. It's not a vision of social justice. But there is—because of the existence of the Soviet adversary in the whole Eastern Bloc and the threat of a good example coming from socialist economies—a real concern with the many tools the US is using against the Soviet Union; and concern with making the capitalist model work and deliver a little something for the people at the bottom, while it delivers profits and tremendous fortunes for the people up at the top.

There was actually some real development in the Global South from the end of World War II until about the mid-seventies. A lot of that development you can critique for its horrible environmental impacts. But they were raising standards of living in many places. There is real infrastructure built. But with the profit crisis of the 1970s, the West turns away from that developmental view. In the 1980s, beginning with the Latin American debt crisis, they start imposing severe forms of economic restructuring and austerity in the Global South.

This marks essentially an undoing of a previous development model and scrapping of embedded liberalism in the Global South. Scrapping of a developmentalist element to the global counterinsurgency against socialism and communism and the replacement of that with a smash-and-grab asset stripping, a model of accumulation based on plunder—and that's neoliberalism. So that really kicks in with the Latin American debt crisis beginning in 1981. Those policies of austerity in the face of unacceptable, unpayable debts in the Global South crack open and smash to pieces one economy after another in the Global South.

It begins with Mexico and Argentina, and by the early nineties, they're doing this same process in Kenya. By 2012, this process of smashing and eliminating any trace of social, democratic, political, or economic policy [occurs] in places like Greece. In 2011, Greece is treated the way Mexico was treated in the early eighties. This whole process of neoliberal economic restructuring rides along with the legacy of Cold War militarism. It totally destabilizes society. It increases inequality, making some people really rich. Not very many people—some people. Most people are increasingly very, very poor. It interacts with the legacy of Cold War militarism to create real destabilization.

Now, increasingly comes the third destabilizing ingredient of extreme weather caused by climate change: droughts, floods, the effect on crops, food prices, infrastructure, and transportation links that all of that creates. The interaction of those three forces is what I call catastrophic convergence. It is active in terms of the story of Tropic of Chaos. The book unpacks how these three forces interact in different places with local variances.

In Afghanistan, economic restructuring is not really that important because Afghanistan never went through a classic neoliberal economic restructuring. But the destabilizing effects of Cold War militarism are extremely important. The Soviets invade. They occupy. They keep on life support an Afghan socialist government and the U.S. in turn, along with Saudi Arabia, pours $9 billion through Pakistan into the Afghan theater to fund the seven parties of the Mujahideen who are fighting the Soviets and the Afghan communists.

So the book began with the situation in Afghanistan now. I was researching opium cultivation, poppy cultivation and the opium trade in Afghanistan. Farmers would say again and again that part of why they grow poppy is that we're living through this severe drought. Because of this environmental crisis. It's a good crop because it's very drought resistant. So you realize part of what's fueling this war—which really has very little to do with climate change at first glance—is the fact that they’re embedded within the war on this drug crop. Why are the farmers so tenaciously sticking to it? Why do the farmers who are sticking to that crop want to support the Taliban? Because the government is attacking them because it's a drug crop, it's an illegal crop. The occupiers, the U.S. primarily, don't want this drug crop produced and exported, but underneath all that, there's clearly a climate angle to it. So, that's what catastrophic convergence is.

Then, in other places, it's quite different. In Brazil, for example, there was never any war. There was a small bit of guerrilla activity and counterinsurgency. But the primary issue there is economic restructuring. The neoliberal economy which has weakened the state. The two things that happened are the military aspect of this and the economic austerity aspect of it. The military aspect of it malformed the shape of the state, and then the neoliberal economic restructuring weakens and pulverizes the state, reduces its footprint, opens it up to capture and corruption. Put those two together and then add climate change. That's what the book's about.

Kamea Chayne: Certainly, it shows up differently in every place. But it's important to look at how these different factors, climate change, the legacy of the Cold War, militarism, and neoliberal economic restructuring, and how these things come together to create the conditions for the various power dynamics and social conflicts of today.

There's this common acknowledgment that in our current dominant economic system, that a dead tree is worth more than a living one, and that, generally speaking, extraction and exploitation are more profitable than healing and assigning greater value to labor and our full sense of humanity beyond productivity. This becomes the underlying incentive of the system that we're in because the system orients towards endless economic growth that by nature privileges and empowers the corporations and institutions that extract and exploit the most. It also, by nature, leads us down a path towards ecological degradation with those at the top being disproportionally shielded and protected from those crises.

But what I've struggled to comprehend and process is how exactly our economic and political systems have come to define value in such a reductive way and what it is that even determines value for the system, that then creates the incentives for collective destruction and exploitation. So how have you thought through this, using your multidisciplinary lens and your view that the state should be understood as an inherently environmental entity at the heart of the value form and as central to our understanding of the valorization or valuing process?

Christian Parenti: The system, as you're referring to it, is capitalism. Right? Let's be clear about it. The value system, the ideology, and the moral landscape you describe is rooted in a set of material practices that I think Marxism best explains. That—and this is my synopsis of Marx's value theory—when the value of money, historically speaking, becomes dominant, it starts defining the entire character of the society.

Capital is a thing, but it's also a social relation. It is the private ownership of the means of production that then commands labor power through the power of money, purchasing labor power as a commodity, to produce other commodities that are then sold into markets, that then return to the capitalists, the investors, more money than they began with—and that social circuit, between the owner of tools and land, the means of production and the owners of labor/workers of labor power, mediated by money for resolution realization in markets that then return money… That is the germ cell, the cancer cell of capital as a social relation.

It comes to define but not completely dominate a form of society that we call capitalism. Within that, there is the capitalist class, which is the ruling class that owns the majority of the means of production and calls the shots fundamentally in that society, but not always in the way they want. They're constantly trying to broker control of society and everyday life with the working class, who are the majority and who resist unconsciously and informally through malingering and quitting and deviance and failure to adhere to the value system and formerly through trade unions and rebellions, etc…. [And] there are factions in the capitalist class. Capitalist society is full of conflict and chaos.

The fundamental problem is this set of arrangements that we call capitalism that has at its heart this cancer cell, which is that capital is a social relation.

The system is continually reproduced through the political agency of the capitalist class, which is itself never fully united but unites primarily within national projects, and thus is constantly reproduced by the state.

My most recent book, Radical Hamilton: Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, is all about the hidden in plain sight role of the American state in the production of American capitalism.

This is a relatively, historically speaking, new social system. It emerges in the 1600s, really. There are elements of capitalism all throughout ancient history. In Rome, which is primarily a slave society, there's also wage labor, there are artisans who produce commodities to sell for cash, returns, and markets—but most people are serfs or slaves, and most of the production is rural in nature. The social relations that we now realize as defining capitalism are minority components of the overall ensemble of ancient Rome, for example.

Kamea Chayne: So how you thought through this—how we come to define value? What is it that determines value in such a reductionistic way?

Christian Parenti: The way this translates then into an ecological crisis is that there are real material incentives. Getting back to your point about a dead tree being worth more than a living tree, there are immediate material rewards in the form of money, which is social power. You can do all sorts of things with money. So that's why.

And investors need a return on their money or it will lose its value. So beyond any moral or ethical concern that an investor might have, they have this material economic imperative, which is to at least not have their savings lose value. That alone forces competition and forces a search for more and more profits, more and more value extraction. [Then] the crucial thing about that germ cell of capital is that the capitalist only makes a return on their investment if they pay the laborer more than the value that the laborer produces with their labor power. So that means there's a structural, built-in drive towards exploitation of labor.

If a capitalist advances $1 of raw materials and means of production and then pays $1 for whatever a dollar's worth of labor time is and they produce, those $2 are destroyed in the process of production. They produce $3 worth of value and take only one to replace their spent capital and give the other $2 to the wage laborer as wages. Then there will be no profit. No surplus value. Surplus value comes from keeping one of those dollars. The third dollar has to go to the capitalists who advance the first $2, even though the new value that's produced in the production process is actually produced by the labor power of the labor.

So that habit, that social force of exploitation of keeping that third dollar rather than giving it to those who produced it—that's not just the result of a bad attitude. It's not just the result of greed and people being nasty. It's a structural imperative in a market where in a world where markets are managing surplus for individuals, for households, for institutions, and they're all expected to have as much as they put in, or more. But when they need those returns and thus there is a huge question of the corrosive moral effects of capitalism. That's all very real. I'm just saying it can't be reduced to that.

You can't think that a bunch of nice capitalists could get this to work in a fundamentally different way. They couldn't do it. It has to still be the same system and these different units of capital, these businesses are in competition with each other. If you do not ruthlessly compete as a business owner to accumulate at least some or significant portions of surplus value, you run the risk of losing out in these competitive markets. You can have your market share taken from you and you could be driven into economic extinction if you can't maintain production at the rate of profitability that you want. Your competitor could come in and then just lower prices and wipe you out. So, you have to be able to defend yourself by having these margins being able to expand and move against your competitors.

So there are all sorts of dynamics like that in the capitalist economy that inculcates and instills and reproduces what at first glance looks like a bunch of moral choices, a bunch of ethical lapses. [But] these moral choices and these ethical lapses are in many ways the secondary effect of something deeper, which is the structural dynamics of this mode of production.

Kamea Chayne: To further this discussion on value to the present context in various places around the globe, gas prices are reaching historic highs, which I understand largely to be the result of the convergence of both a decrease in supply and an increase in demand. Within these conversations, I largely only hear people address the supply part of the equation, which is something that I would personally challenge. But I do want to start there.

Some people talk about our need to greenlight more drilling projects in order to increase supply, at least for the short term, to alleviate the strain of this increased price of gas, especially for working class and low-income people. At the same time, others talk about our need to use this opportunity to really amp up our supply of alternative energy, such as solar and wind, in order to accelerate this “green energy transition.” But there are also costs to this as well because that increase in supply would require the expansion of mining projects disproportionately in the Global South.

So, as you consider visions like the Green New Deal, while having a clear understanding of global politics and war, I wonder how you see this path forward interacting with the other social factors we talked about and the catastrophic convergence and how it might affect or shift our resource conflicts around the world.

Christian Parenti: Well, I am feeling increasingly cynical about all of this stuff. I'm feeling cynical primarily because of the COVID pandemic. I wrote a big piece for The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal's publication, about what the left got wrong on the COVID pandemic, which is to say primarily to some extent the disease, but primarily the lockdowns, which created this tremendous economic crisis and then this massive rise in indebtedness. It's one of the most profound—well, the second most profound political event of my adult life.

This is an enormous change in the politics of everyday life. The left has, in my opinion, completely failed to meet the test of this. It's hard for me to answer your question without bringing it up to the present and looking at the response to the coronavirus pandemic, which I think has been marked by hysteria and overestimation of the danger of the disease. Complete gullibility about the effectiveness and safety, but primarily the effectiveness of the vaccines. I say this as a heavily vaccinated person, and I'm not against vaccines. But a real vaccine is like the smallpox vaccine. You get it once and it lasts your whole life. It covers not only the named disease but lo and behold, some other ones as well.

Four jabs and you still get sick? I mean, come on. We do have to grant the vaccines the fact that they do reduce death and hospitalization, it would seem, particularly among the elderly. But to act like these vaccines can drive the disease to extinction the way the polio vaccine did. That's obviously not the case. Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, last summer started saying that the vaccines cannot stop transmission and they don't. They don't stop transmission and they don't stop infection.

Yet the left has embraced these lockdowns, embraced mandates in which people are losing their jobs, embraced a regime of showing your papers, a surveillance regime that they never would have embraced if it had been done in the name of the war on terror or something like that. But because this nominally, scientific, purely apolitical thing like a disease, everyone's critical faculties have gone out the window. So I am made very, very cynical by that.

That's [my] larger context for thinking about inflation, the energy crisis, and climate change right now. The Democrats have squandered an opportunity. They did that not by mistake, but they did that because they are a fundamentally authoritarian, deeply pro-oligarchic party that is as committed to repression as the Republicans are, though along different lines and probably more committed to global militarism than the Republicans are if we're to take the counts of the vote in the House and Senate for the $40 billion of military aid to Ukraine. It would seem that the Republican Party is the anti-war party that 157 votes against and not a single Democrat in the House or the Senate voted against it. This is appalling.

So in terms of the Green New Deal, I'm somewhat soured on it as a concept because the squad can't vote for $40 billion proxy war in Ukraine and still with a straight face, talk about the needs of the Global South. This is going to have massive and terrible impacts on people in the Global South fueling this war. I'm not defending Vladimir Putin. I'm not saying, “Oh, the Russians should have invaded.” I'm just saying that the US pouring money into this war is going to kill a lot of people in the Global South who won't be able to afford grain and who will have to ration grain, and whose children will become malnourished and then succumb to diseases that they otherwise would have survived.

Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people over the next 5 to 10 years will die as a result of the price shocks to the food markets that are a direct result of that $40 billion vote that Bernie Sanders and the squad voted for. So, it becomes a lot more difficult for me to take seriously notions of the Green New Deal. That said, what should happen is that the government has to shift its structure of subsidies away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. That's happening to some extent, but not enough.

We went through the crisis of 2008 and then the crisis of the coronavirus lockdown shocks. In each of those, there were massive amounts of public money advanced and very little, if any, demands or stipulations upon that money that would go into building out real renewable energy infrastructure. So I am extremely cynical about the ability of the American left to achieve really anything on that front.

Kamea Chayne: In 2012, you wrote an article for The Nation sharing: “To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government."

This intuitively makes sense, though, I wonder, first of all, if your views on this have changed over the last decade and whether you see Big Government as equating with the centralization of power. Because I get the sense from a lot of people I've interviewed before that a lot of activists and community leaders see the decentralization of power as necessary for social justice or community-based sovereignty and self-determination and for healing place-based ecosystems, with the solutions being more bottom-up than top down. So I'd be curious to hear your thought process on why you think Big Government is necessary in the face of the climate crisis and how this would affect the so-far seemingly unjust trend of the centralization of control and power.

Christian Parenti: I am not in favor of the over-centralization of power. That article was not about centralization, but about the role of government. It used the example of storms in the Northeast, in New York and Vermont, where I'm from.

The extreme weather of climate change forces the state to come back in. Since Tropic of Chaos came out, I've been saying that the state is coming back. But the open question is what form will it take?

Will it be a repressive police state? Or will it be a state rooted in planning and redistribution and increasingly serving the collective whole rather than the oligarchic few through repression, etc? What has happened is that indeed one crisis after the other, the state has come forward and been forced into the breach to patch capitalism back up and relaunch it, but not in a progressive fashion, in an increasingly authoritarian and top-down way. So, I am not blanket in favor of Big Government. The argument was that Big Government is going to become more and more central to our lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, the question is what kind of government?

It’s going to be very interesting to see how the infrastructure bill that Biden passed plays out in practice. Even though climate change was not part of how that was discussed or pitched, it's fundamentally implied. Because what’s going to affect infrastructure? Climate change.

For example, where I live in western Massachusetts, the local utility, thanks to deregulation under Bill Clinton, is skimping on repair and maintenance of its lines. And we don't even have a [real] local utility. We have an insane situation in which when a tree comes down and the lines in this little neighborhood I live in go down—because this happened not too long ago—literally five different companies have to show up. The company that owns the lines, which it turns out no longer sells power or anything in this area, but they own the lines. Several companies sell power in this area. And then there’s the several companies that do cable…

Literally five different companies that had to show up to patch together a very minor little problem whereby one tree took out the lines on one dead-end street, that affected probably a total of about 20 households. So there is no longer a utility. There is instead this deregulated, insane ecosystem of totally dysfunctional, frequently dishonest, profiteering firms controlling infrastructure. [Everything they’ve set up is] all rotting. Because the company that maintains these lines, I forget which company, isn't under regulatory pressure from the federal government to invest in maintenance.

They're not replacing these poles. Instead, what they do is they take pieces of guardrail from the highway, aluminum guardrail, they'll patch the rotting bottom of the pole with a guardrail, and spray paint it brown, the color of the wood. When a hurricane or the remnants of a hurricane finally make it this far inland in the mountains, they're going to take down so many of these poles. That's going to force the return of government because these firms are not capable of dealing with this. So that's what I meant by the way that climate change forces the return of Big Government.

Getting back to the infrastructure bill, even though climate change isn't named, climate change is what's going on. These things: hurricanes, floods, and this assault on infrastructure are all about climate change. So, then the question becomes, thanks to this bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed. The question I think becomes what can states and localities do with this money? Can they use it? Can they use the money as a form of climate adaptation, even though it wasn't billed as such?

I think the answer is very much yes they can, and that a lot of climate adaptation is happening under other names, such as rebuilding stuff, [it’s being] rebuilt a little higher. Rebuild it in a safer way. Bury the lines if you can. So that's about adaptation. But there’s the problem of mitigation. We do not have the policies that we need, which should be euthanizing the fossil fuel industry and building out the renewable energy industry. I say that not as someone who thinks capitalism is in the long run sustainable. I don't think it is sustainable, but it is imperative that actually existing capitalism build out as much green infrastructure as possible, if there is any chance of future social arrangements achieving sustainability.

Kamea Chayne: There's so much here. But I think for me, only addressing the supply side of the energy equation, thinking about how we either increase supply or shift the source of the supply of energy, even if towards expanding solar and wind by way of expanding mining projects largely is a question about harm redirection and the outsourcing or shifting around of extraction and who pays the price for it. Which is why I've been curious to think through how we can systemically and unravel centralized and industrialized production systems and actually lower the energy intensiveness of those systems, in part perhaps by realigning them with the place-based landscapes and what they can each readily support.

But I'm still processing my thoughts on this and wonder what you've thought of as our possible ways forward to not have our solutions just shift around our resource conflicts and outsource environmental burdens, but actually to help us heal both global injustice and over-extraction.

Christian Parenti: Sustainability for modern human civilization, among other things, requires an increase in the energy content of goods and services, that we actually have to increase energy consumption while at the same time moving off of fossil fuels.

The good news is the earth is not a closed system. It's an open system. Every day we are bombarded by more solar energy or maybe the same amount of solar energy that civilization has used in its entire existence. Right. So there's actually no shortage of energy. It's just a question of how are you going to grab it? We use solar energy when we burn fossil fuels. It's just millions of years old. So we have to use the current solar energy. There is lots and lots of energy. The question for sustainable modernity on a global scale is about moving from this fossil fuel-based economy to what is fundamentally a solar economy.

Wind, hydro, all that, those are forms of solar energy because they're all driven by the energy that comes from the sun. The only form of energy that's not solar energy is geothermal energy because that comes from the molten core of the earth. But [with] the others, fundamentally, the source of the energy is the sun. It takes different forms. It can be photosynthesis, prehistoric ferns that are compressed into coal and oil, or it can be the heat that drives wind cycles on the terrestrial earth. It can be the heat that drives evaporation and the hydro cycle and then becomes hydropower resources. So those are the two choices. The energy that comes from the center of the earth and the energy that comes from the sun.

There are actually enormous amounts of energy. If you think big picture, there are infinite amounts of energy. Our mission is to transition off of fossil fuels toward these renewable energies. So in terms of what you're saying about reducing consumption, I agree with that. As a principle, in terms of efficiency, that's part of the transition. But it can't be a grounding principle for understanding what a sustainable, modern civilization will look like. The other choice is to reject modernity and accept a massive die-off of the human population. I'm not down with that. Some people are certain types of environmentalists that greet that with alacrity and glee. Not me. I like people. I like my species and I like civilization, even though I complain about it a lot. I don't want to see it collapse.

So if you're committed, as I am, to a continuation of some version of civilization, not of capitalism, but of this “modern” civilization, then I think we have to accept that we can't do that only through austerity or through a ratcheting down of energy consumption as part of the transition.

To bring this down, that might have been a little abstract... Farmed fish is energy intensive. Indoor farming is energy intensive. There are vegetable farms at an essentially experimental scale that are built in abandoned coal mines and in former industrial buildings. All of the inputs are brought there with energy through electricity. Water is brought in, artificial light, artificial temperature, and frequently there doesn't need to be pesticides applied because these can be controlled environments. These are very, very energy-intensive ways of farming. If that's done based on fossil fuels, it's a colossal mistake. But if that energy-intensive vegetable farming or fish farming could be done based on the infinite power of the sun, then who cares what the energy content is? The only question is do we have the technology and the social resources to produce the technology at the scale necessary to capture that energy?

Kamea Chayne: So I guess part of the challenge now is that the infrastructure needed to convert the infinite solar energy into forms that are usable to power a civilization aren't renewable themselves. That's the challenge that we have to face today.

Christian Parenti: Yeah, and there's also the question implied and implied in what you're saying is the non-energy related stuff about how a green transition involves mining and despoiling ecosystems. It does; [there’s] no way around that. There have to be better versions. And it has to be done not for profit. If global mining was operated according to the logic of human civilization rather than profit maximization, it wouldn't be without any detrimental impact on existing ecosystems, but it would be potentially much less.

There is definitely the problem of non-renewable resources in the transition and that's something that has to be mitigated along the way. There are also enormous amounts of many of the resources that we need already existing, but they're in landfills. So, it's about catching valuable resources and extracting them to find ways of recycling, not at the scale of households, but at the scale of whole regional metabolisms.

Kamea Chayne: So, as a final added note, I’m not sure I agreed with quite a few things there, like the sustainability of intensive agriculture and the assumption that a decrease in our collective use of energy and electricity equates with a collapse of human civilization. Because in a way for me, that dehumanizes the many thriving communities who don’t have the same energy intensiveness in their lives and cultures when compared to the most extractive corporations and those reliant on industrialized, centralized systems.

So, I think there’s a lot more to unpack there in the future since this was the end of our time here, but in the meantime, we have had a lot of past episodes with different angles and takeaways on energy and agriculture that I encourage people to check out.

And also real quick, I want to express that I think it’s important for us to use this as a reminder that people are complex and there are many people interested in supporting sustainability and social justice and public health and have those shared intentions and values, but who based on having different cultural or educational backgrounds or social influences, have different visions of what our paths forward looks like.

And that has been quite evident with our over 300 interviews with different people who have varying and sometimes even conflicting perspectives.

So, as with every conversation on this show, I hope these diverse narratives encourage us to keep recalibrating our critical lenses and learning from more sources and voices, and, yea, not take anything at face value, even things that I say because, I’ve been wrong before, I’ve evolved my thinking so much over the years and I still have more questions than answers for the most part, which is why I personally want to be exposed to as many different views as possible because they help me to, first of all, understand this movement better and understand the complexity of people better. But also because I think this is how I can arrive as close to the “truth” as possible.

So, I just wanted to add this note and with that, we’re now going into our closing fire-round questions. Christian, what has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Christian Parenti: There have been so many. Right now, I'm reading State of Emergency by Keith Vanderpool, and I'm also reading Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary. It's a critique of social media and online addiction. But one of my favorite books is Francis Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: the CIA in the World of Arts and Letters.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Christian Parenti: A personal practice that keeps me grounded is not being on social media and not being overly involved with screens. But I actually am constantly engaged with screens and I don't like that. So, resisting the constant domination of screens.

Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration right now?

Christian Parenti: My biggest source of inspiration right now are journalists such as Ryan Grim and Max Blumenthal, who are standing up to the orthodoxy around COVID and investigating the question of the lab leak and questioning the necessity. Ryan questions the lab leak and is doing very good research on the origin of this whole pandemic, which very clearly seems to be US-funded research that by mistake went wrong and we should not be doing this gain of function research. Ryan Grim has been very diligent on that and brings it to a wider audience. I think that gives me a lot of inspiration. Max Blumenthal's critique of the US’ funding of the Ukraine war is very important. Aaron Maté also doing fantastic work in that regard.

So younger journalists who are pushing back against the consensus, in the Gramscian sense, common sense, a received opinion of the society, on some of the most charged questions for the left. While being leftist, pushing back against not only the elite narrative, but the left consensus around those elite narratives—that gives me a lot of inspiration.

Kamea Chayne: We previously had Max Blumenthal on the show before, and we talked about really challenging what credibility means and looking at the media industrial complex. I highly recommend our listeners go back to listen to that episode if you haven't yet.

But Christian, thank you so much for joining me on the show here. Several past guests had mentioned your work and your name, so it's been an honor to have you here. For now, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?

Christian Parenti: Be here now. Enjoy. Don't get too caught up in those screens.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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