Max Ajl: A deeper green new deal for the people (ep336)
If the popularized vision of the Green New Deal were to be realized, how might that play out? And how do we contextualize the historical process of creating nation-states deemed as “underdeveloped”, “developing”, or “developed”?
In this episode, we welcome Max Ajl, Ph.D, the author of A People's Green New Deal. Ajl is based at Wageningen University's Rural Sociology Group, and he is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. Ajl's academic articles and reviews on Middle East and North African agriculture and development theory have been published in Globalizations, Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, along with several in the Journal of Peasant Studies.
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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Fallen Stars by Desmond White
“When we talk about the ‘development’ of the ‘First World,’ we are literally talking about the extraction of wild spices, cotton, textiles, silver, and sugar. ‘Underdevelopment’ and ‘development’ is actually a relational process of theft.”
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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.
Kamea Chayne: If the popularized version of a Green New Deal, as it's been laid out today, were to be enacted and fully realized, what might that look like? And crucially, what does it leave out?
Max Ajl: Suppose Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal would be implemented, and here we have to engage in a bit of projection because one of the facts that's kind of been under-articulated in relation to the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal is that the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal is very skeletal—like quite a fair bit of her political positioning, it is a bit nebulous, a bit opaque. It can be interpreted in multiple ways, and it just shows in multiple directions. But with that said, we have several main lines of policy associated with the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal.
The core of it is probably one partnership between communities, state, and private capital. This is pretty much explicit in the text of her non-binding legislation, on the one hand. On the other, there is a call for the U.S. to become a leader in the development of green technology. And then there are a lot of things that aren't there, which would be relevant when we talk about what the impact of the Green New Deal would be on the remainder of the world.
So something to keep in mind when we hear about the impact of the Green New Deal on the rest of the world is that with U.S. capitalism, settler-colonialism-imperialism is already a way of managing and constituting the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world.
When we talk about a Green New Deal, either it's going to transform the appearance of some of those things while keeping the core factors the same, it's going to actually transform in a positive way, or it's going to make them worse. But if it doesn't mention them, then it's obviously going to keep the basic flows and hierarchies in place.
So I think what we would see is a huge, huge push towards renewable energy investments, perhaps state-led, in order to finish getting the costs below to a point where it's very profitable for the private sector, but then with the private sector taking the lead. We would see a large, substantial build-out of probably state infrastructure, especially around mass transport, because there's really very little way to imagine dealing with the climate issues without that. You would probably see a lot of state investment in things like biofuels, lab meat, possibly nuclear. And you would see the greening of the U.S. military.
You would see massive amounts of mining and resource extraction in the ‘Third World’ — in countries like Bolivia, Chile, and the Congo because that is where a lot of the minerals necessary for a green transition are located, or at least the economically-recoverable deposits. Using the current technology, you would see a lot of investment in carbon capture and storage to try to get that technology either profitable or scaled up, although it's really quite a pipe dream, and you would probably see the U.S. charging extortionate rates to the ‘Third World’ for the sale or technology sharing in relation to the renewable technology. And you would see probably continued intervention in any ‘Third World’ country that didn't want to play ball with the agenda I just laid out.
Kamea Chayne: It's definitely a little concerning because I feel like we're already embarking on this path. And that, to me, raises a lot of red flags. As we mentioned, the Green New Deal seems to have become widely known and supported primarily by activists in nations like the U.S., but less so in the Global South or, as you say, the more periphery nations.
Can you speak more to the Eurocentric nature of the Green New Deal, and also why global elites or those with profit motives may still or may have even welcomed and helped fuel its rise, if not just for their moral concerns about the state of the planet?
Max Ajl: I think I should probably elaborate on some of what I meant earlier.
Any massive social-economic policy that is being crafted, forged, and implemented in the U.S. already is acting to either uphold, transform, or worsen the existing system of accumulation that already exists on the planet—accumulation on a world scale, which involves the U.S. sucking labor and resources out of poorer countries very systematically.
It's a bit Byzantine to explain this. [There is] something called the uneven exchange. Basically, what it means is that an hour of labor in the U.S. buys the labor of, say, 10 or 20 people in Africa, and it even buys the labor of people who are using the same types of technology that we're using in the U.S. It would still buy much more of their labor just because wages are suppressed there. And what that means is that people in the U.S. have access to more of the things that are produced in the whole world than people in the South. That's what we mean, in part, by uneven accumulation.
I mean, that's meant to serve a broader goal of profit and to the great profit of the northern monopolies. The way it manifests is that there's a sharp divergence in who has access to all of the things that are produced and also all the things that go into those things, meaning labor and resources. That access to those things is sharply uneven in the north and south. That's just the world. That's the world we live in. That's the colonial system. That's the neo-colonial system. That's the world.
So unless a Green New Deal actually explicitly names that specific developmental pathology—which is, in fact, the pathology which is endemic to capitalism—unless it names it and actually lays out specific remedies to actually deal with those pathologies, then those pathologies are simply going to continue. That's fundamental. So the problem with the Green New Deal as it's been proposed is that it doesn't really deal with this economic system as it actually is. And this is particularly a problem on the left, where there are real or purported, depending on the personality and aspirations to things like egalitarianism and progressivism in a just world.
Now, if you want to make the world just, you have to say, OK, what are the things that are making it unjust and let us deal with those things? If you don't acknowledge that those things are making it unjust, you can actually make it just. It's just common sense, you have to know what a problem is and all of its little sub-problems in order to fix the problem. If someone's describing a different problem and you try and fix a different problem, but that's not the problem you're facing, you’re not actually going to fix it, right? So this is where we get into the troubles of the Green New Deal and say, OK, we're going to offer technology transfer and the U.S. being a green-tech leader and selling very profitable technology...
Is that the problem of the “Third World,’ that it can't buy technology? Or is it that it's old colonial debts from colonialism, from neo-colonialism, from a closure of the atmospheric space, and so forth? I mean is the problem, as it is sometimes posed, merely debt cancelation, or is the problem the massive debt load that the ‘Third World’ countries pay to the U.S. every year? Or is the problem not only the fact that they're paying these debts continually, but that the debts that they've already paid and all the interest on that that actually should be paid back to them in the form of reparations? Which is what Fanon called for 60 years ago. And that, furthermore, that there should be reparations paid for the climate.
So we have to clearly identify the problem, especially as that problem is posed by the people and the popular movements and the governments that crystallize the aspirations of those popular movements in the periphery in the ‘Third World.’ We have to listen to what those people are actually saying. These are our problems and these are the solutions we envisage. And then people living in countries like the U.S. or the United Kingdom or Australia can say either one, we're on board with that or two, we're not interested. That is politics, right? That is politics. Some people will be like, yeah, we're on board with that. I hope a lot of people or progressives will be on board with it. I don't see any reason why not.
The people who are not are interested in a fundamentally different kind of project. I think it's just important to be clear. OK, then you're interested in a different kind of project where you're not interested in building with the most legitimate, wide-ranging, ambitious demands from the ‘Third World.’ You're interested in picking and choosing. OK, everyone lives their life and is in the world as they wish to be in the world. But that's a different kind of thing that they want to do.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. The fact that the Green New Deal itself doesn't challenge the underlying system that is predicated on endless extraction has been a big red flag for me, especially after learning about the non-renewability of the technologies and infrastructure needed to convert renewable energy into what can be used to power civilization. And they're still limited there. That can't accommodate endless growth.
Though inevitably people raise this question of, what if we just accounted for the negative externalities and assigned higher values to our “resources” and “labor,” in essence, creating a more conscious version of the current system through reform. What are your thoughts on that and what might still go unaddressed without a deeper transformation?
Max Ajl: So there is a push to value ecosystems resource and what are called ecosystem services and so forth. And there's a lot of documents that circulate [saying] ecosystem services provide $66 trillion dollars in value for humanity in the year 2021, etcetera. I mean, these people have their hearts in the right place, but their minds are really awry. I mean, the price system is not an end, it's a means, right? The price system is a means to facilitate uneven accumulation, to circle back to the original point.
The price system is a means, it's just a mechanism, like a computer program, a code that ensures a polarization of accumulation, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
That's what the price system is doing. So people who want to re-engineer the price system to say, the long-term interests of humanity and the short, medium, and long-term interests for non-human nature are putting the cart before the horse. Because to reform the price system in that way actually requires a massive political struggle. It's not that price doesn't matter, but it's that you need a massive political struggle in order to change the price system to actually make it humane. Because the prices are more or less set in one way or another by people who are the kind of the avatars of a system which is emphatically not human.
So there have been attempts like this before, to politically engineer the price system on a world scale. I mean, this goes back to the 60s, 70s and 80s. There were widespread demands from the South for fair exchange for their commodities in exchange for the manufactured goods of the richer countries. Now, this project was shattered. Why was this project shattered? A large part of why this project shattered, in addition to the fact that the U.S. was waging absolute warfare against a lot of the countries in the South that were really fighting for this transformation in world prices is that it was countries like Algeria, on the one hand, supposedly in a common camp with countries like Saudi Arabia on the other. Whereas Algeria was the product of one of the massive anti-colonial national populist revolutions of the previous century, and Saudi Arabia, which is basically a creation of the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department, Bechtel, Halliburton, Exxon and so forth. It's just a creature of U.S. corporations by and large.
That political project of re-engineering the price system was saying, OK, we have these two forces — one wants to challenge power, one doesn't want to challenge power, and supposedly they're agitating to make the price system more just and more in the interests of the ‘Third World.’ So, of course it failed, right? Because they weren't. It wasn't thought through properly at the political level or there wasn't enough power. And there were some people who made opportunist decisions, right? They kind of put the cart before the horse. They were like, OK, we want just prices without thinking, OK, who is interested in just prices and who are our friends and who are enemies in the endeavor to make prices just? It's a similar thing with this idea that you can price ecosystem services.
Now, the other problem with pricing ecosystem services is that, in a sense, the externalities are already internal. Capitalism, on the one hand, is subsisting and thriving based precisely on expelling the costs onto the environment just by massively damaging the environment on North-South grounds. So the southern environments are much more damaged than the northern environments. That's part and parcel of the price system, right?
Why would the North, and the corporations in the North, accept a renovation of the price system? They'll say, "get lost."
They're not really willing to accept any sort of renovation of the price system until it seems that the overall system of accumulation itself is in danger of collapse. Then they'll be willing to do some type of revamping, but not a revamping that challenges the hierarchy of our world, right?
Kamea Chayne: On that note, to deconstruct the dominant discourses on climate action even more, as corporations and governments are setting their agendas and commitments, we often hear this seemingly ambitious goal of net-zero or net-neutral and things like that. And because the dominant climate discourses tend to focus on the cause of the problem being excess greenhouse gas emissions, net-zero and net-neutral may seem like they're on the right track…
But what loopholes are there with this type of framing that allow for a certain elephants in the room to go unaddressed? And how might its reductive approach lead to “solutions” that may even be destructive?
Max Ajl:
The net neutral idea is functioning on two distinct timescales.
On the one hand, in the very immediate time scale, you have this kind of proposal that carbon emissions can be what's called offset, that a corporation can burn a gallon of gas and plant three trees. And OK, it's carbon neutral. I mean, if it's claiming and, in a sense, monetizing the carbon dioxide-absorption capacity of those trees. So this idea of net-zero is already existing in a sense, in embryo, in a lot of the dominant climate conversation. But the problem is that it's been a total falsehood, right? It's been impossible, basically, to verify that those trees that, say Exxon, hypothetically plants in compensation for the barrel of oil that it sells — it's been impossible to verify that those trees would not have otherwise been planted. In other words, very often, these so-called “offsets” are just taking credit for things that would have happened anyway, and they don't lead to less carbon dioxide emissions. That's one thing.
Another problem of net-zero is that even if it's purportedly successful at some level at offsetting some of the emissions, the problem is that we need to get to negative emissions. All of the IPCC climate pathways envision a heavy usage of negative emissions merely to make the planet survivable past 2050, right? That's the only way. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, you have a brief overshot to 1.6 to 1.8 degrees Celsius, and then you can go back down by the end of the century to below 1.5 using negative emissions technologies. So we need those negative emissions technologies in addition to getting to not net zero, but real zero, right? We need below zero. So it's imperative to get actual CO2 emissions, methane in check here. We can discuss that more later, but CO2 emissions must get very close to zero. I mean, it's not clear that you can get all the other processes you need to zero. And this is not the most significant thing. The thing is that you have to more or less get close to zero right now. That's that's another thing.
Now, the third thing, the third kind of pernicious aspect of net-zero is that net-zero often is proposing a certain set of technologies to get to net-zero, right? So these net-zero technologies, suppose they are proposing something like mass-reforestation or mass-afforestation, now, the listeners should pay attention, because those aren't the same thing. Reforestation is putting a tree where a tree was cut down. Afforestation is adding trees where they historically have not been. Now one problem of this idea of reforestation is that it relies on models about where trees have been historically. But the models are very bad. Often, they rely on this idea that Europe and the U.S. and even North Africa were just always covered, blanketed in trees. This is kind of a western fantasy that has been exported and promulgated and recklessly applied to all countries of the world, including the West itself. And it's not the case, right? You actually have tapestry landscapes all over the place. You don't have this type of blanketed trees or a blanket of trees everywhere. That's one problem.
Two, the problem is with this idea of afforestation, which is now being widely touted both on the right and the center, and also on what passes for the North American left. I mean, the North American left is sort of a death trap meant to disorganize and control leftists and prevent them from actually contributing to changing the world. But, be that as it may, there are these ideas of afforestation, of planting trees everywhere. The problem is that it is not ecologically appropriate to plant trees everywhere. This is a huge problem. First of all, if you plant the same type of tree all at the same time, it's going to just cause immense damage to the water table because they're all sending down their roots to the same water table to drain the whole water table, right? Which could cause huge damage and dry out the landscape. And there are also a lot of landscapes where there never have been trees there, savanna landscapes where there might be a tree dotted here and there, or a cluster or a clump of trees every now and then. This is not what the landscape is used to being, right.
So you are putting trees where traditionally you have grazing animals and so forth, bison or gazelles and so forth. So these are just environments that are not particularly suitable for trees, the places where they have attempted to do reforestation and afforestation. There have been attempts in Ethiopia, Morocco, it's been kind of roundly unsuccessful. I think there was a report that just came out. A peer-reviewed report that got wide publication [and] came out about 10 days ago, I didn't have time to more than skim it recently, but basically, it stated that there are no successful examples, really, of this kind of wide-scale, intentional, climate-oriented reforestation, that it's not a particularly successful thing to do. Yeah, this is the basis of a large portion of even the IPCC calculations regarding negative carbon emissions, which is much more rational that much of the western left.
So you have these proposals for a kind of biofuel or (biofuel is sugarcane) and so forth [that] competes with food crops. The more biofuels or crops that you convert into some form of fuel that is purportedly carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, it competes with food crops. So basically, yeah, you can get to a form of net-zero perhaps, maybe you can, but you also starve huge portions of the world population. And of course, this has happened before. This isn’t a kind of conjecture hypothesis. I mean, we know very well that, for example, when bread needed to extract cereals, in Bengal, Keynes, the hero of Western economics, John Maynard Keynes kind of engineered a famine in Bengal to extract the necessary resources and millions of people died. And in fact, we know very well that after the collapse of the USSR, suddenly, a huge amount of the demand for food disappeared from the market. It disappeared from the market because tens of millions of people practically started starving and dying. That's what happened. That's what the former USSR meant, right? A huge amount of human suffering.
So this idea, of course, that the West would not carry out this type of forced starvation is actually not really accurate. Look at Yemen, where people are actually starving to death right now. This is the type of thing that's entailed in net-zero [proposals]. Net-zero [proposals] at either their worst or best, I don't know which is worse, at their best they are excuses to keep polluting. Or even if net-zero will work, it would involve basically using already-used natural resources and lands for the purpose of purely carbon farming, which would have catastrophic livelihood impacts. I mean, this is basically universally acknowledged across the left, liberal to radical, sustainability, natural resources community. Everyone is basically in agreement that these types of interventions will be absolutely catastrophic. I mean, the IPCC and the U.N. say pretty much the same thing.
It's just that corporations are not very interested in incorporating the concerns of humanity into their own calculus for how to deal with climate change.
Kamea Chayne: There's a lot of nuance, and there are a lot of unintended consequences when people and corporations take this reductive approach of hyper-fixating on the equation of carbon sequestration and they leave out the broader context of the communities and the regional communities that are involved. And another concern that you have with the Green New Deal and even with the degrowth movement generally, speaking with exceptions, is that they aren't really situated in an acknowledgment of the impacts of imperialism. And we had talked a lot on the show before about colonization and how it has disrupted place-based knowledge, cultures, communities, and relationships needed to care for our diverse bioregions.
But to ask a more basic question, how exactly does imperialism play out for those who are less familiar with this concept? And how does it relate to colonialism and our global extractive system?
Max Ajl: Imperialism is basically the domination of a weaker country by a stronger country in its most basic term, right?
So that can take the form of colonialism where countries actually lose, their people lose control over the political architecture of the country and the politics of that country become under the formal control of a foreign power, basically European and in a later stage, American. That's basically colonialism. Imperialism often can take the form of colonialism, meaning it can take the form of a direct political control over foreign territory.
But it can also just mean the economic control and the drain of wealth. So, for example, it can mean investments. It can mean investments in raw materials. It can also mean offshoring production and suppressing wages. Industrialization is, for example, occurring in Bangladesh. But there's massive environmental pollution going on. There's massive violations of the human and labor rights of the workers. And what happens is that there's great profit mounting up in the coffers, in the bank vaults of the corporations that are carrying out these foreign investments.
So what do imperialism and colonialism have in common? Of course, colonialism has been part and parcel of imperialism, for the most part, in that we have kind of domination of a weaker country by a stronger country. And the domination is used to facilitate the transfer of wealth and resources from the poorer country to the wealthier countries. Of course, there are very important variations in the process as well. For example, settler-colonialism is where you actually have the murder [and] genocide of Indigenous populations so that the most important resource can be transferred from the poorer country to the richer country or the richer country's population, namely the land.
Settler-colonialism is basically a process of shifting the control of the land itself from the people of the poorer country to the people of the richer countries. That's exactly what happened for people who have some sort of socio-political relationship to global Europe, we can say, right? So this is basically what we're talking about when we talk about settler-colonialism. In the United States, control over their land and its resources passed from the people living in the lands of Turtle Island, before it was the United States, to white settlers. It's the same in Palestine. Although, you know, some of the settlers were, of course, from from the Arab lands or from Ethiopia, from Iran, etcetera, although the political and economic control in Israel is controlled by white Europeans. But the most essential point is that the control of the land, the resources of land passed from being part of the ‘Third World’ to basically being distributed more or less among the people of the ‘First World,’ right? And you have similar dynamics in Zimbabwe, or in fact, Namibia, [where] the land continues to be under the control of the settlers, even though there has been a form of decolonization, right?
So we're really talking about uneven control over world resources on racial grounds. I mean, that is kind of essential to imperialism and colonialism. We're talking about a global color line that helps determine which kind of socio-political bloc controls the lion's share of the world's resources. Within that bloc, of course, there's intense differentiation and also in the poorer blocs, there's differentiation as well. But this doesn't reverse the fundamental pattern. Now that's what we're talking about when we talk about imperialism. This is the system from 1492 onwards. This has been the deepening logic of our entire system.
And so if the Green New Deal is not talking about changing it, then it's talking about maintaining it. So this goes back, I think, to a very small thing, I would want to take a small issue with what you said that this is occurring unintentionally...
I think these things are occurring uncaringly rather than unintentionally.
I just think it's it's a small but important distinction only in the sense that, you know, a lot of horrible things can happen without intending them, but people should know the effects of what they're doing. That's part of why it's important to raise the debate about the Green New Deal, to clarify that people should know the effects of what they're proposing: net-zero, global veganism. Once [the effects have] been raised to them, if they still purport to not pay attention to them, whether they are intending the consequences are not, they're certainly responsible for that, right?
Kamea Chayne: I totally agree with you on that and I appreciate you calling that out. Would it be accurate to say that this history of imperialism is what essentially created these “categories” of what people will call “developing” versus “developed” nations where oftentimes “developed nations” are viewed as more advanced and more superior, but they kind of need to be contextualized with the history of imperialism and the injustices that itself created?
Max Ajl: Absolutely. I think this is so fundamental. A scholar named Andre Gonder Frank coined the term “the development of underdevelopment,” right? What he was pointing out, building on on work actually from Latin American historians like Sergio Bergoglio, was that in fact, under-development was a historical process, the outcome of the process of so-called development in the North, that these were two sides of one coin. And of course, two sides of one coin, that's one coin — the coin is the historical process.
So these countries are “underdeveloped,” actually, there's a huge amount of research now showing very clearly that the wealth of the ‘First World’ is very much based on the wealth, which then became the poverty of the ‘Third World.’ And so we know this very well. Let's take just a few examples that I think [help] clarify. I mean, we know very well, for example, that France's wealth is hugely based on sugar profits that came from slave production in Haiti, right? Just a massive amount of wealth was continually drained out of Haiti for years and years and years and years and decades, leading to France's enormous wealth. We know that the lands of North Africa were used for cereal and grapevine production, and these were just direct trains of wealth that went from where the fertility of the soil itself, the labor of North African laborers, basically was kind of alchemized into the wealth of both French settlers and also the kind of French trade which brought those products from North Africa into metropolitan France.
And there's very, very, very detailed work. The most detailed work on this kind of process that's known as colonial drain has been done on India and Indonesia. To my knowledge, Indonesia, the wealth drains to the Dutch, which is part of why the Netherlands is a remarkably wealthy country, despite its central lack of natural resources. And then Utsa Patnaik and also Prabhat Patnaik, they are a couple of Indian economists and have done this miraculous work detailing the drain of wealth from India and how basically this led to the concentration of wealth in England. So basically, England's wealth is based on the poverty of India. One of the factors is the interest rate. What amounts to trillions of dollars was drained from India and transmitted to England over tens of years, over the course of decades.
When we talk about the "development" of the ‘First World,’ we are literally talking about the extraction of wild spices, cotton, textiles, silver, and sugar.
This is sent from the periphery, from the ‘Third World’ countries, to the core, because that wealth is taken out. It adds to the wealth and therefore creates what's called the “development” of the ‘First World’ and robs that wealth and therefore creates the poverty and what's called the “underdevelopment” of the periphery. So we see this as a relational process. This is the relation between them. Underdevelopment and development is actually a process of theft in a certain sense.
So this is very much why, for example, in the Cochabamba People's Agreement, which not only do I discuss in my book, but which is freely available online, and I always encourage people who listen to these interviews to go check that out. The Cochabamba People's Agreement, you can read up on it. It discusses the ecological debt. The climate debt that's owed from the north to the south is actually one component of the broader ecological debt. So in that way, they avoid this problem of climate reductionism in that the ecological debt is only one portion of the colonial debt in the sense that these thefts of the ecological well-being and atmospheric space for carbon dioxide and the effects of global warming and so forth, these are actually only components of the broader colonial debt. There was a reminder in that document that we have to keep the colonial debt in mind too.
What that means is focusing on this overall process of the role of colonialism in constituting the world as this "underdeveloped-developed" dyad or pair.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And without addressing this, the Green New Deal, as it stands, has this vision of switching 100 percent to renewable energy that's just going to uphold the same relation through the extraction and transfer of minerals and in orienting towards anti-imperialism, you say, "Each nation has to essentially start from minding its own business,” and, “Non-intervention in the affairs of other nations needs to be the starting point for world-wide environmental justice and environmental revolution."
I feel that this may be construed or misconstrued as nationalism or even isolationism when perhaps it needs to be understood by people through the lens of power and control. So I wonder if you could clarify this further and how you would unpack the different levels of collaboration that still need to take place for everyday people wanting to show solidarity with other grassroots movements around the globe that might be fighting for their own liberation against their own oppressive powers and governments?
Max Ajl: When we talk about things starting with the hard-line policy of noninvolvement in the affairs of others, I mean, that is, of course, talking about noninvolvement on the part of the imperial state.
This is saying that the U.S. state in particular, which is probably the one I can discuss most intelligibly, should stop its military operations. It should stop its proxy-arming operations, ships, and stop its intelligence operations. It should stop its spying. It should stop its assassinations. It should stop its naval blockade, stop its unilateral illegal course of actions, more commonly known as sanctions, which it's now applying to dozens of countries in the world, that it should stop applying diplomatic pressure. That it should stop using IMF loans in order to pressure political outcomes. That it should stop tying aid to certain political outcomes.
What we're saying is the U.S. does not have the right to decide how other countries run their affairs.
Right now, we're talking about the U.S. state and we're also saying this is actually a very hard and fast rule that there are just no exceptions to this rule. The U.S. does not have the right to decide how other people live. It has neither the authority nor the competence to do so, and we also know that whenever it carries out these policies of interference, it’s doing so on behalf of the class and power in the United States, which is the ruling class.
So we have a hypothesis of the relationship between the economic system in the U.S. and the political system such that we understand that this call for noninterference is actually a call. It's a positive call. It's a call for the U.S. government to cease carrying out these activities, which essentially enrich the richest segments of the U.S. population and harm people in the periphery and also indirectly, people in the United States as well.
Now, this is not a denial of the importance of international solidarity, right? I and many other people I've spent many years living in other countries and trying to understand what's going on there, researching developmental problems, translating journalism, human rights reports, translating their texts, explaining their political struggles, supporting them, and making their political struggles knowable or legible to people in the United States. So this is not a policy of isolationism. This is a policy of clarifying a specific political task in relation to where we are and in relation to certain power systems that we want to disrupt, while at the same time doing international solidarity. But making sure that that international solidarity is actually working against the interests of the U.S. government because we understand that there is no reforming the U.S. government in terms of its actions abroad. What it needs to do is just chill out and not be involved in actions abroad, right?
So this is not about isolationism. That's just clarifying a starting point that other countries have. To have this right of self-determination and be equal to the U.S. on the world stage, in the same way that the demand for decolonization allowed all the countries of the world to have (for the most part) to have political sovereignty to take their place among other nations within the international state system...
This doesn't mean the international state system is a particularly good system. But we understand that it's better than having countries that are actually colonized.
That is a step forward in terms of the formal equality of our peoples and that nonintervention is actually just an affirmative defense of the gains of decolonization, right? It's saying, OK, we need to defend those gains and then we can talk. Or even at the same time, we can talk about how to go beyond those gains. But any talk of going beyond those gains has to actually continue to defend the gains which have already been achieved and are now being rolled back, and a lot of people are like, well, maybe it's OK to intervene in that country. The situation is pretty bad there. There are these people need our help. I mean, this is how it's always spun. This is the rhetoric of intervention, that there is a humanitarian mission or a civilized civilizing mission. So we need to push back against that way of thinking.
Kamea Chayne: And then finally, looking ahead to lay out a vision that centers communities globally and national sovereignty and the sovereignty of peoples, you propose an alternative to the Green New Deal and its mainstream variations with the People's Green New Deal. What does this mean for our listeners who really resonated with our conversations here in terms of guiding our actions going forward?
Max Ajl: So the People's Green New Deal, or at least what I put forward in my book, and I don't really think I would want people fighting for necessarily what's called a new deal, but some of the proposals I think are good. [It] has just six or seven essential planks that I think we need to focus on. There are planks related to internationalism and there are planks related to domestic reconstruction.
The internationalist planks, to just go back and continue from where we left off, are noninterference in the affairs of other states, decolonization of the remaining settler-states, including the U.S. itself, the payment of climate debt to the south, to the tune of $1.2 trillion dollars from the U.S. to the Global South every year, and comprehensive demilitarization of the U.S., so, the abolition of the U.S. military now that's insofar as we relate to other countries.
Now, in terms of what happens domestically, we need to think about how to make people's lives better without extracting resources in an unjust way from the South. And I think that can be done. I think can definitely be done. It just needs to be carefully detailed how to do it. So it's things like one, you need fundamental agrarian reform and you need far superior landscape management in the U.S.
Landscape management is, in some places, especially in cities, [it can be] planting trees, it can be urban gardens. It could be flood prevention. All of those things actually make people's lives better. The only thing you actually need to do any of those things is a little bit of labor, right? You don't need to extract things from the ‘Third World’ to plant trees and urban gardens and to add more parks to cities and to put in place flood prevention both in the city and the countryside or to restore fertility to the soil so it can better absorb rain. I mean, we know very well that these floods are going to be a greater and greater issue as global warming gets worse and worse with extreme weather events. So it's about saying, OK, let us put in place these prevention measures to make people's lives better and not have to pay these huge costs in terms of the destruction of their lives when floods occur. It's also about thinking, OK, what forms of production will actually allow people to have better lives, clean up the environment, and give people jobs?
And then we have things like refurbishing industries for creating solar-powered heat or water heaters of various kinds, fixing up the infrastructure, and building up mass transit systems all over the entire country instead of planes. So in this way, these modes are building up a social infrastructure, [they] are building up the things that are useful for people in the U.S., and [they] actually decrease the overall impact on the ecological and social impact of the U.S. as a country or as a social formation. So in that way, we should always start from the premise.
What are the things we can do to make our lives better, and especially protect the lives of the most vulnerable in a country like the U.S., without making people's lives worse in the poorer countries? That should be the measure.
The more renewable materials, including wood, bamboo, etcetera, that are used for manufacturing and construction in the U.S., the less you have to extract things and cause ecological impact from the periphery and also just on the planet as a whole, right? So this conversion actually can make people's lives better because a lot of people would love to live in wood, bamboo architecture, and objects made from bamboo rather than plastic. It’s common sense: you make people's lives better, and at the same time, you reduce the impact of U.S. production and consumption on the rest of the world. So this is another way of looking at things.
I mean, another thing is the commodification of the U.S. healthcare system. The U.S. healthcare system is extremely emissions-intensive with horrible outcomes because it's technology-intensive. So the great profit of the health insurance companies and also the corporations that are manufacturing medical supplies for the U.S. healthcare system, why not invest in much more training for doctors, nurses, and especially general practitioners? Have many more of both doctors and nurses and have a prevention-focused healthcare system rather than a reactive healthcare system. In that way, you can sharply reduce the carbon used in the healthcare system and it will actually probably improve healthcare outcomes on a population level basis.
You can do that, but you have to have an orientation to resisting capitalism, you also have to be thinking ecologically about healthcare, which is something that is not necessarily something everybody is doing. You have to be thinking about bridging struggles. Between the struggle for our national healthcare and the ecological struggle. And you have to be thinking about the third brother, thinking about both where the materials for a lot of the kind of energy and technology-intensive health interventions that we currently use, where that comes from. And furthermore, where a lot of our nurses come from, for example, a lot of them come from the Philippines or elsewhere in the ‘Third World.’ So there's a drain of doctors and nurses from the periphery. So we have to invest our social resources and in our own training. This is not at all about nationalism. This is about thinking, OK, how can we change the way we train, produce, and consume healthcare in order to make everyone's lives better, except for the corporations whose lives we definitely want to make worse?
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Max Ajl: Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Max Ajl: Stay optimistic.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your greatest sources of inspiration right now?
Max Ajl: I am very much inspired by the ongoing resistance of people in the Philippines, in Palestine, and in Yemen to absolutely brutal processes of counterinsurgency, if not extermination, and still fighting for land and dignity.
Kamea Chayne: Max, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a pleasure to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Max Ajl: Please go read the Cochabamba People's Agreement.
