peaker 1: I am here with Matt Huber, author of Climate Change's Class War, building Socialism on a Warring Planet, out from one of the people you'd expect it to be, out from Verso, and we're here to talk about a couple of things today, which is the intermingling of the labor movement and environmentalism, a topic I have covered as well with Josiah Richter, but also maybe the different approaches to that question, because once you get to that question that there is a relationship between the labor movement and the green movement, one that is kind of obscured, i think, by the kind of conservationist movement being seen as representative of the environment a little bit, you then get into what are you going to do about it, which leads to a whole different series of debates. Let's start off. Before we get to what you're going to do about it, let's talk about what the relationship really is. How is climate change a class phenomenon? 

Speaker 2: Yeah. So in many ways the book was trying to respond to a more mainstream sort of analysis of climate change as a problem of inequality. Or Oxfam America, thomas Piketty, have done these analyses of what they call extreme carbon inequality And essentially what they show is that if you're richer and you have more money, you spend more money on consumption and you have a higher carbon footprint associated with that. So they do all these analyses. Look, the rich emit way more than the poor And what I noted is that all these analyses are just centering on consumption and lifestyle choices as the source of all emissions. And it really struck me that this is not a particularly Marxist analysis of class. It's basically based on people's income and consumption and lifestyle practices And that actually just sort of erases the role of ownership and production in provisioning all forms of lifestyle and consumption. So I mean there's a lot of other stuff going on. I mean, essentially, the whole idea of a carbon footprint was really invented by British petroleum. It's part of their Beyond Petroleum campaign. I think they're very happy to have this narrative that all of us contribute through our consumption to the carbon emissions, because it takes a lot of attention off them as the producers. But it's also just sort of a basic level. Every moment of consumption, when you're emitting carbon, can link back to someone that's profiting off the sale of that fuel. Let's say So you're driving your car, you're emitting, yes, but the oil company sold you the fuel. They're making the money off of it. You're just trying to get to work. You're just sort of reproducing your life. 

Speaker 2: And the biggest thing that drives me crazy is that I think the rich consumption is the least of our problems when it comes to climate change, because we really should be paying attention to how the rich generate their money, not how they spend it. 

Speaker 2: So if we look at how they make their money, we see they might be owners of, say, a chemical company that emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year, and they spend eight to 12 hours a day organizing that network of chemical factories, and that's just an enormous impact. And yet when people talk about people's carbon footprint and carbon, they only pay attention to what that person does outside of their role as a capitalist. So if they drive an SUV, that's what the problem is. Or if they eat steak, that's what the problem is. But the real problem is that they accumulate capital and want to expand carbon-intensive production. So in any event, looking at it from that angle, it's just like basic Marxist definition of class as your relationship to production and ownership and power over production, and it just creates a totally different way of analyzing the climate problem, i think. 

Speaker 1: So what is the conclusion you come when you look at the way the actual production of class plays into this? And one of the things Desire Richter pointed out is how much environmental legislation came from labor protection legislation and was explicitly advocated for in the 60s and 70s And then was kind of not entirely intentionally written out of the history books about the way those legislations were passed, not entirely being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. And what other ways do you see? like you know, yes, we talk about climate. I hear climate justice in terms of inequality all the time, but and yes, i will also, you know, i've had some green advocates that are at me that like well, even if you look at the fact that most of this is capitalist production that's doing most of the polluting is still ultimately for consumer goods, and I was like OK, then I'm not sure what you're trying to like. 

Speaker 2: No, i mean that's a popular argument And it's rooted in neoclassical economics like consumer sovereignty, and it's a view of the economy that it's really consumers that have the power and they drive demand, they drive production decisions. There shouldn't be any people on the left or Marxist making that argument. Like we should understand that again. Like the real power in the economy is those that own productive resources and those that control production. And so when you look at it this way again you know we're told that like responsibility for climate change is so diffuse, it's sort of distributed through behaviors, but if you look at it in terms of who owns and controls production, it's actually quite a small group of people. So it's a much more straightforward class of people you have to confront to deal with climate change. It's not easier to confront them, but it's at least a little more straightforward than kind of this quite moralistic project of like converting the lifestyles of millions of dispersed consumers. It's just a different kind of class project you have to be involved in. 

Speaker 1: So one of the things I think that you really point out that is downstream from these assumptions but directly related. I'm going to continue flashing your book up. You start off telling the story of Al Gore, but you don't tell it as in the normal, like Al Gore, savior of our knowledge of climate change, or Al Gore, dirty hypocrite, who owns a super mansion and travels by jet, both of whom both stories were pretty common in the last decade. You tell it as a story of the failure of knowledge as a form of way to deal with a social issue. 

Speaker 2: Yes. So I feel like we're dealing with this. This week One of these IPCC reports just came out. So this is sort of liberal view that, like, the climate crisis is fundamentally about knowledge and the science and if we just get the science more accepted, then we're going to sort of naturally lead to more action on climate. And so there's this idea that, like, sooner or later, like if we can just convince the masses of the truth, of believing the science, then we're going to solve climate change. 

Speaker 2: And it acts as if, like the worst thing that the fossil fuel industry does is they fund climate science denial, like that's the most sinful thing that they do, as opposed to like a mass political power through. You know, you look at like the Koch brothers. They like basically write laws for state legislatures and, not to mention, they extract fossil fuels and profit off it handsomely. So you know, i argue in the book that it's it's a very professional class or professional stratum, whatever you want to call it. It's a little dicey, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a politics of a class that's really grounded in credentials and educational attainment and ideas of meritocracy and being smart And like, when you're coming from that kind of position like knowing the science and spreading the truth of climate change, is the sort of like the most important thing you think needs to get across. 

Speaker 2: But you know the yellow vest, gilles Jean, eruption in France. You know they had this slogan politicians care about the end of the world, but we're just trying to get to the end of the month. It's just very clear that this politics of do you believe the science isn't actually really reaching people and they're more everyday concerns, material interests, that that they might actually respond to. So in many ways, a lot of a lot of these liberals kind of look at the masses as sort of misinformed and sort of idiots that don't quite understand the science right. So it's a real problem, real political non starter in a lot of ways I think. 

Speaker 1: That's I remember a couple. Well, the last four years to me have all been one blurry, long year in a lot of ways. But I remember somewhere, i think about two years ago in the bill back better rounds of negotiations, i lost my shit with the progressive caucus. And the reason why I lost my shit with the progressive caucus is not that they were insisting on climate change legislation being in that bill, but that the hill they thought it was the best to die on was the carbon tax. 

Speaker 2: It was something called the clean electricity performance standard, which was this really wonky way to regulate the electric utilities, to decarbonize very quickly And anyway. I mean Joe Manchin said, you know, like that's out, that's not going to be in there, and he killed it. So they realized quickly they didn't have any hill to fight on because Manchin blew up the hill or whatever. But as far as I know, i will give Biden and just the Democrats and Congress right now credit they actually concluded that carbon pricing and carbon taxes is not a good, smart, political way to go for climate change, and so they've tried to reframe it as you know what they call it industrial policy is. We're sort of like trying to create a lot of they call them carrots and incentives to to, you know, do the right thing for the climate. And there's no kind of sense that you know, solving climate change means sort of raising the price of energy through taxes or through cap and trade systems or through all these things. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i noticed that in the difference between the stuff argued for in the bill back in the bill, back better, where the progressives, through a fit of it, and what they did in the inflation reduction act where they, you know, passed the most progressive climate legislation I have to. I just it bugs me because I put it in scare quotes, not because it isn't true, it actually is true. But I was like it's not even half of what you guys committed to in the Paris Accords. So I guess it's good that you actually put it in legislation. But but anyway. But I did notice it did not have the the punitive carbon taxing elements in it that we had seen and and maybe that they had learned something. 

Speaker 1: That said, it also still, despite all the green, developmentalist stuff in it, has a kind of poison pill of tying all that directly to traditional carbon industries like coal and gas. And then you have the fact and I don't think this is talked to about enough as a labor issue but that a lot of the non scientific specialist jobs in clean energy development are, to put it mildly, shitty jobs. Yeah, yeah, they, they, they vastly tend to be more unionized and traditional carbon extraction They, a lot of them are kind of gig worky? Yeah, absolutely, and so I still have not seen that dealt with. Where you know, even if we replace these jobs in traditional carbon extraction with quote green jobs, these green jobs right now, unless you are a scientist, are not particularly good. 

Speaker 2: And it's just sort of the nature of the jobs. If you've ever heard of the labor reporter Lauren Gurley, she did an incredible analysis of solar jobs and how exploitative they are. They are gig work. They're provisioned by 10 agencies. One's called People Ready It's a literal company And she shows the labor conditions for these solar workers. They're building these solar farms in very sunny places So they're exposed to extreme heat, you know. But also, like she talks about, some of them are in, you know, exotic places where there's like snakes and alligators that are like. These are workplace hazards for these solar workers. 

Speaker 1: But essentially like what's that. I grew up in those places. 

Speaker 2: So, like you know, the nature of these jobs is they are spread out in remote places and they are transient work. You know, if you're kind of a fully automated communist type person, it's pretty cool that when you build these solar and wind installations they provide free energy without you don't need much labor once they're built right, because they're just harnessing the free energy of the sun and wind. But that means that they don't create any kind of permanent jobs like a traditional power plant would. So I was just looking into a solar farm in Texas that has like 1800 construction jobs, which is a lot, and some of those jobs have been unionized through like the international brotherhood of electrical workers. but that solar farm with 1800 jobs leads to two permanent jobs to. so, and you know, like some of these have more permanent jobs than others. 

Speaker 2: I think offshore wind has a sort of more sort of long term kind of industrial model to it, and the inflation reduction act also has at least the hope that they're going to incentivize the actual domestic manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines and all this kind of stuff, which is almost, all you know, mostly produced in China and offshore right now. So if that happens, like you know, manufacturing is a great avenue for workers and unions and all that kind of stuff. So that might be good but, like the solar farms and the wind farms are just not like you said. they're not good jobs, they're not going to be Organizable and not not particularly conducive to working class power. 

Speaker 1: That's for sure, stay with us, we'll be right back. 

Speaker 2: Yes, we're a food bank. 

Speaker 1: We collect and distribute an impressive amount of food, but that's not all. We're a hub of caring people doing all we can to end poverty and hunger and improve health. 

Speaker 2: Welcome Welcome. 

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective Podcast. Everyone at the table? Yeah, that's. That's a part of this I think is often not discussed in real detail. Yeah, particularly when we talk about the Green New Deal, where I'm like, if you got, if you bring the development part of it in, and we talk about making those good jobs. I'm with you, but I remember the Obama recovery. Those are not good jobs And if you're promising that as the alternative, you're going to turn what little sympathy you might have in the rust belt in the south and the sun belt for replacing the broke ass coal mines with something much better against you, because you're not, you're not offering them a better life at all, and I think that really, you know, maybe you're offering them life at all. 

Speaker 1: I guess there's this weird kind of bait and switch on this when you, when you bring this up, we're like yeah, but we're saving the planet, and I'm like well, one, i hate to inform you, but climate change is going to be a global effort. But two, more importantly, in a lot of ways, like you have, like you want to post capitalist transition society for this. Fine, i'm not opposed to that, but you're not there yet and you need to do stuff now. So how are you going to do that in a way that gets people's well being tied into it, beyond an abstract trade off? Exactly, yeah, and this was the perfect example. I was glad you spoke about it in your book. 

Speaker 1: There's been other trade offs. I mean, there is the Belgian controversy. I know that. I know a lot of people in Belgium told me a lot of those people were like small farmers who were not poor, but I was like, yeah, and I'm with you on that to a certain degree. However, i will also say that, being from the South, a lot of proletarian are invested in local small business in ways that are logical in an immediate sense, because they're the ways these people make their living and they're downstream from them. And if you're going to hurt that group of people or hurt that industry, you're really going to have to make it viable that there's something else to replace it immediately. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2: And I think there I mean, if we really were to solve climate change, it would require a massive reindustrialization of the economy. It would require building new energy infrastructure, new transmission lines, new transit infrastructure, new public like public We could fold in public housing and that kind of project would be about building a new society in a way that would generate lots of jobs and lots of livelihoods for workers and create union opportunities. But we're not there, we're not doing that, and so if there's this sort of vague sense that we're just going to build a bunch of solar farms and wind farms and that's going to take care of it, that's not going to be a conducive window. So, like you were sort of hinting before, the unions have often been at loggerheads with environmentalists because the climate and this includes the climate movement the climate movement is most comfortable blocking shit. I don't know if I can say that, but like blocking stuff, like blocking pipelines, like doing protests at coal mines, to kind of block that. Just recently Greta Thunberg is blocking a wind farm in I think it was Sweden, because there's an indigenous tribe up there that's really upset about the wind farm. They're blocking wind farms. So that is like where the climate movement is And in fact, naomi Klein, her 2014 book called it Blockadia. 

Speaker 2: This is sort of the front lines of climate resistance. We're going to just block fossil fuels, but clearly I think to actually solve climate change we're going to have to build a lot of stuff. And that politics it's not that it wouldn't antagonize the unions. It would be like in their naked self-interest to embark on that kind of level of industrialization and manufacturing that would be required. But I think there's a real tension there because a lot of environmentalists, a lot of sort of climate movement people sort of associate industrialization with sort of harm and then justice inherently. But I think that's the sort of path that's actually going to create jobs, create real, like you said, like actually reinvigorate some of these communities that have been completely abandoned by capital and all this stuff. So it's a tough nut to crack for sure. 

Speaker 1: Well, it reminds me of debates over like NIMBY versus JIMBYism, two concepts that I wish I could just get rid of from all of history. And the reason that I bring that up is, like I've told people, for example, urbanization is great for efficiency, but you do have to admit it actually is based on, like, pouring resources in from other areas. If those other areas got payoff from that urbanization, it would be a lot less resented. And I'm going to go back to like classical, early Marxism, about trying to abolish the division between town and country, which is not exactly urbanizing everywhere either. It's more like well, we are going to bring these benefits in efficiency, in all this, to the countryside, and maybe more people will be able to live out there and have the benefits of the natural world if we can do it in a way that replicates the kinds of efficiencies we get, which, admittedly, is a little hard to do because you're dealing with centralization versus highly decentralized energy, that grids and whatnot. 

Speaker 1: But I think it's something that socialists really have to think about. And then I'm like that requires us to rethink development, like one of my stances in the growth-de-growth debates, and we're going to get to that because I know you've been invested in that lately is that I think from the standpoint of production, at least in the short run, fixing a lot of the problems are going to require a lot of quote growth, whatever the fuck we mean by that. However, it's confusing when I talk to people about that, because I'm like you guys think of growth solely in the expansion of GDP, which is an expanse of exploitation in some ways. I'm not sure that we're talking about that, like we're talking about outputs and hopefully remaking inefficient outputs with efficient ones, and if you have non-capitalist incentives, you can make them in ways that they will last, versus when you have capitalist incentives, when there's literally no incentive to make them last a very long time. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. Socialism should be about rational planning and efficient use of resources. So I'm okay with all that. 

Speaker 1: Right. Well, that was my point when I saw those fights. I'm like when Matt's saying he believes in growth, he's not saying he believes that we should expand GDP forever, like he's saying that we're going to have to redo industrial output and like, just on some basic levels. I used to live in Atlanta, a city that is in perpetual drought. Why is it in perpetual drought? It's not because it actually doesn't have plenty of rain, it's because its entire water infrastructure is budding like 1910. And it's a city that's expanded to like I don't know 25 times what that capacity was built for. But currently, pulling all that infrastructure up, there's no capitalist incentive, even for the state to do it, like it's too expensive compared to the payoff until it starts to just I don't know collapse, which is occasionally happening. So then I go. It would be a massive infrastructure project to go in and put efficient green piping and water infrastructure in Atlanta. 

Speaker 1: Now you start thinking about that in terms of transportation infrastructure and terms of which, oh my God, i mean there are going to be some places where you're never going to get rid of personal cars. Sorry, i hate to explain how that, like running mass community chains to low population areas, is not particularly efficient yet, but so we will probably need something like a few electric cars. But a lot of this is like I would personally, having lived in other countries that were smaller but had really good public transit system, love to not own a car. Me too, i would love to just give that shit up. It's expensive, it's time consuming. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i have the. You know, one of the happiest I was ever been is when I lived in South Korea and literally you could get anywhere by bus or train, you know, even in the middle of nowhere. You know, maybe you'd have to take some rickety natural gas taxi, but like for 10 or 15 miles at most, but in general you can get everywhere you need to go by foot, train and bus, and living like that was awesome. There's no place in America where you can easily live like that, except maybe DC and New York. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For whatever reason, often my position gets represented as wanting to just keep American privatized consumption patterns the same. But any socialist would want to like rationalize the consumption of energy and collectivize it. You know, like the reason it's so good to live in that like South Korea is like it's just it just sort of makes sense to use resources for transportation in this sort of more collective way. You know, obviously you're going to get a lot of people who are like anti-social and would prefer to like be alone in cars all the time. But I think most people would understand that this is just a much more rational collective use of resources to invest in public transit and collective infrastructure and cities and housing and things like this. 

Speaker 1: I like to tell people, headphones in a book can achieve a whole lot of isolation. If you want it to Like, you don't have to be social Although, as a side note, as a person who would amount with a mild anti-social bent, for a whole lot of younger people would probably be helpful for them to be social, and I mean that in general. I have seen plenty of evidence that there's a variety of forms of social isolation, that this sort of infrastructure which breeds alienation, when combined with work structure that breeds alienation, takes a toll on people, and particularly not as a working class. And I've been really big on like, really pushing like. We should talk more about how the US is, you know, for people making under $150,000 to see in a decline in life expectancy. That's something we should really be talking about. Yeah, absolutely, and I also think if we took a green approach to this development it would help with all of that. 

Speaker 1: But when we're tied up in like, should we try to live on agrarian communes with? I don't know? I want to talk to you. So actually, you wrote a critique that was also picked up by Doug Hinwood of half Earth socialism, which is one of the. I actually bought the book off of your critique to see if it is what it is. I haven't finished it yet so I can't speak to that. But one of the things I've noticed about some of the degrowth socialism and I'm going to put Kevin on anything I say here for people at me I'm not necessarily against all the ideas in degrowth socialism, but some of them reminded me almost of like a Howard counselor, like let's go back to the 18th century or like Oh God, yeah. 

Speaker 2: I'm an oil scholar, so James Howard counselor, right, the peak oil guy, right. Yeah, yeah, you remember it. The long emergency, right? Yeah, so I was deep in the peak oil, i was learning about it and then I learned to reject it. But I was sort of really reading a lot of him and, like Richard Heinberg and these type of people in the aughts, that was sort of where I was in the aughts. 

Speaker 1: So I talk a lot about my political journey probably too much But when I came out of being a conservative, i went through this period of like Marxism and Floyd and Richard Giss, but I went through also in that time period. I think we have to take our brains back to the end of the aughts where, like it was like this weird war between primitivist and transhumanist With, like people who were into peak oil, and I remember when I grasped peak oil I was like huh, even if it's true, i don't think it means what you think it means. I think it means that, like, we have more expensive oil and weirder technologies to extract it. I don't think it means that, like society goes back to the 19th century in two decades or whatever. Yeah, so, but there is a width of that. It's not quite the same And I want to be careful and like over generalizing here And what I've seen from some of these degrowth advocates who seem to really think it would be possible to take a planet of the size that we live on And convert it to a mostly agrarian style society and do so without a lot of use of modern agricultural technology, which is the part where I'm like I don't know how you do that. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, like yeah, you know, i have read the odd article that says yes, we can organic farm with some efficiency methods in specific areas almost as efficient at throwing nitrogen fertilizer on things, but but in most areas you can't. Yeah, and and I just yeah. 

Speaker 2: Sri Lanka just did an experiment with us. They tried to ban chemical fertilizer and it did not go well. And I mean to be fair. 

Speaker 2: I think that, first of all, the half or socialist book never says, if I'm correct, never says the word degrowth. And they don't claim to be the growthers, but there are a certain genre that that has some overlaps, I would say. And when it comes to the degrowthers, they're always very slippery. They definitely don't claim to advocate some sort of full on return to agrarian. No, they don't. You know socialism or whatever. 

Speaker 2: And but they, all of them, I think, seem to agree that in a future eco socialist society that more people should work in agriculture. So that, I think, is something they, they, they all agree on. And and and they, they do very I think. I think it's fair to say they agree that we should renounce a lot of the gains that have come through industrial agriculture, particularly nitrogen fertilizer, which to me is I just read something the other day that claim that half of humanity now is reliant on this really wild thing we did in the 20th century. You know, apart from fossil fuel revolution, the nitrogen revolution is probably in terms of raising our, our, our food product productivity like it's just unprecedented in what we were able to do. So So yeah, I think there are concerns about that. 

Speaker 1: I do have concerns about night, about using, about overusing, nitrogen fertilizer because of things like algae blooms in the ocean. 

Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, but there are problems with it, for sure. 

Speaker 1: But my response is always like well, why don't we just try to develop a better nitrogen fertilizer? Are some replacement for nitrogen fertilizer or some some way of like? actually, what the likelihood in response is like learning where and when to deploy this in a more efficient manner where we don't use as much, i don't know, near oceans or something like I realize. I realize that water cycle is not that simple, but yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2: No, it really, it really is. You know, you can develop seeds and different plants that can take it out more efficiently. You can do all these things to. Again, it's like plenty. You need more planning. You need more rational ecological planning to use it in a more efficient way. 

Speaker 2: Because right now it makes sense for the producers of nitrogen to just sell as much of it as possible, and then it, and oftentimes the farmers are trying to hedge for bad seasons, so they just dump it on their crops with the hopes that if it's a good rainy season they're going to get a boom crop. And so it's the capitalist system sort of as hardwired for it to be wasted and to be pollution oriented. But I think with a rational socialist planning approach, you could definitely use it in way more efficient ways. So, but the key is that when it comes to natural sources of nitrogen, i mean, we don't have a lot of options to replicate what this kind of synthetic nitrogen is able to do, so manure and cover cropping, and you know we exhausted the guano islands off of Peru and the Chilean nitrate fields in the 19th century. So I think we are going to have to use nitrogen and just use it more efficiently, just like everything else that a socialist approach would take, i think. 

Speaker 1: I've also pointed out to people that if you're using natural bases of nitrogen at that scale, you're probably also doing the same thing to the other. So you would still need to figure out ways to engineer this in a way that it is more efficient. more that we recapture some of it would be great. I mean, there's no incentive to do that in a capitalist economy outside of a very small scale. you know, antique, petty, bourgeois project which they occasion. I mean, i do point out that like yes, sometimes people who have like more reasons that they can run businesses that are inefficient, but like that's never scalable. That's the problem. And it's not scalable as a means for people to go buy from it either. Because if you try to upscale that, usually in this current system what you end up doing is like you actually collapse the business because it can't meet demand. And yeah, exactly So it's, you know, and it gets bought by these big corporations who don't do whatever you were looking at in the beginning. So even that sort of like valiant, small entrepreneur pernure level thing is kind of strategically doomed. Now I know that the DeGraph Socials are not arguing this, but I'm like, when you think about the technologies we would do. that's where we tend to see them right now, but a lot of them either don't scale or, if they could scale, there's no incentive to scale them. So that's something we really have to think about. 

Speaker 1: I tend to be, i don't know. I find that while I'm not one of these bright green socialists and we have some mutual friends who are I am sort of like we have to rethink development just entirely And we're probably going to have to rethink over a long time all kinds of things like I talked about. getting country life and city life more copacetic with each other, which would also be, in any kind of democratic society, politically stabilizing. getting these incentives more lined up And since I don't see you overthrowing the government to do that tomorrow and I guess the other kind of DeGraph Socialists is there's a kind of communizer who really does believe that, like we to fix the climate crisis, we really have to let the climate crisis like do a whole lot of damage to get people to realize their collective need. It's not an acceleration as argument, but it's close And I'm not. 

Speaker 1: I don't think these people would call themselves DeGrovers and I don't want to like slander the DeGrovers by associating with them, but it is an argument I encounter more regularly than I thought. What do you think are the problems with that approach? with like what we have to like, just you know, i almost think of it in more conventional politics. it's the kind of doomer approach like climate change will fix itself because it's going to do a lot of damage, and that's going to like basically force us to innovate, slash, also kill a ton of people, and then we will be in a scenario And I'm always like seems like we could avoid letting a bunch of people die. just you know, like yeah, we could do that, like you can. 

Speaker 2: You can Google this. You may have already seen it, but there's, I think, a pamphlet or a book or an article that's basically just called Disaster Communism and it takes up this idea that, like, basically in disasters is when you know, we develop these. I think Rebecca Solnit wrote a similar type of book, like about how, in these crises, people come together and they rebuild community and solidarity and it's all beautiful and all the stuff. And you know, like we were talking about before, like there is a lot of isolation, animatization in our society. So, yeah, probably is good for people to like sort of figure out collectively how to provision life in a disaster. But I'm just very much invested in the Marxist idea that, like, actually we're living in this ridiculous period of abundance and productive capacity that gives us the opportunity to really create a abundant and you know, like just a not even abundant, just a comfortable life for every human on the planet and abolish poverty and give everyone, you know, each according to their needs, right. Like this is, you know Ingalls talked about, like this is a world historical possibility for the first time in history that we have this productive capacity to deliver the abolition of class and hierarchy in society. So you can't have that Marxist position without thinking that this communism or this socialism has to grow out of these industrial, highly productive systems that exist, Like it's going to those systems that create the material conditions that can actually create freedom and abundance for the masses. 

Speaker 2: Now, a lot of people would say that because of the ecological crisis, that's now off the table, but I still want to hold to that because we still live in this period of, I think, ridiculous overproduction of all sorts of useless crap that no one needs. And, like we still have the capacity to just build a world that works for everyone easily. Right, We have the productive capacity. So, like, if you're going to just say, yeah, I don't like that very much, I want to pin my hopes on disaster communism, Like you said. You're saying that like, yeah, you know 100 million will die or whatever A lot of death but we'll like build up this beautiful communism and in the ruins, right In the, in the ruination of, like that sounds awful. Like I don't want that. I don't think anyone wants that. 

Speaker 1: So anyway, yeah, i'm definitely with you on that, like it just seems. It seems like, hey look, we're producing cheap, disposable crap with our resources. That we could be producing not cheap, permanent, not crap, yes, and we could do it for I don't know literally every fucking body where nobody would have to. And you know, i'm not a believer in overpopulation, but I actually do think population stabilization would be great, ewan says it's going to happen already. 

Speaker 2: So right. 

Speaker 1: My point has always been it's going to happen. Naturally, it could look a lot less ugly if we if we, you know, have rational policies about this, have rational policies about moving from places that are affected. For, like it just seems, it just seems kind of obvious to me that that we have the capacity to do this. There's no political will for it. It's a lot of its capital. It's also the way capitalist states compete with each other, because, you know that leads to a lot of irrational population. You know, appointment People just can't move to where they would be more places for them to, you know. You know, but even in a place like the United States, if we had stuff built up in a more sensical way, like the interior of the country would probably be a lot more developed and also a lot more attractive. And so these are the kinds of issues that I think a lot about. Now, yes, i realize there's some places I don't know, parts of South Dakota that just naturally you're going to have to be a certain kind of person. I want to live there because it's, you know, kind of extremophile weather, just inherently. But in general, i think we could apportion this a lot better. 

Speaker 1: I even thought about, like the you know the quote water crisis. The water crisis is an interesting one for me because that's one mostly of pollution, because I'm always like you know. You realize that, like the water table is renewable, it's a cycle. You don't lose much water in that cycle. The reason why it gets lost is because it gets contaminated like but that's avoidable, like in contamination like natural contaminants such as like human biological waste. That's processable, even You don't. You know, i mean there's other things where I, where I happen, like why do we use anyway, like why do we use so much water to get rid of stuff that's full of nitrogen anyway, where we could like figure out a way to safely compose that? But that's a whole nother thing. People get grossed out by that. But but that spirit I remember, you know. You read like a cybernetics socialist or even like weirdo socialist. 

Speaker 1: Adjacent people like oh Buck, mr Fuller, and they were thinking about these problems in a pretty interesting way that would be incentivized in a non profit driven society. They are not de-growth, unless de-growth means something different, and that's my issue with de-growth. I think it's similar to yours. It's not necessarily that even disagree with a lot of what they're proposing or a lot of their arguments, is that I don't know exactly what they're proposing, except sometimes. Sometimes they seem to be proposing like, like stopping development into developed world so the underdeveloped world can catch up, which I'm just like. We should be developing the underdeveloped world, you know, with them being the people living there being in charge of how that's deployed to some degree. I think people make rational decisions when they have the ability to do so, but not against any of that. Yeah, i'm not a big like socialist in one nation forever thing, so that's not my, that's not my gig. But I don't see why you need to stop development of these, unless you really think that we cannot develop responses to finite resources. 

Speaker 1: Right, that's yeah, yeah, that's, and I don't want libertarians to win that debate against us anymore. That's like because so far they, they, they, they deployed against socialists and other kinds of leftists, because we, we are always like, we are often too pessimistic. I mean, how many socialists got into that population bomb thing in the 60s? It's kind of crazy. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's, it's tough and we don't have to talk about this too much, But, for whatever reason, I remember watching some AOC event where she just talked about, you know, like the lack of housing or something in New York City and she said people are just subscribing to a scarcity mindset, right, And I feel like so much of what we've been dealing with since the 1970s is just basically that It's like a scarcity mindset. It's like we can't afford to do anything. We can't afford to give people healthcare, We can't afford to, you know. 

Speaker 2: And from the degrowth perspective, like sorry, the global north is grown enough and they need to degrow now, like just sorry, the jigs up, the ecological crisis is here, we need to degrow. I mean, meanwhile, there's like hook warm has returned to parts of the US South because of like literally like just decrepit sanitation infrastructure that does not exist anymore. And you know, you have incredible poverty in the global north and incredible need for development and growth to solve a lot of the issues of climate change and all this stuff. So why can't we grow the global south and the global north? That one of the issues is they create a it's like almost like a territorial class struggle between you know it's the global north that's exploiting the global south. So we're going to degrow the global north and grow the global south. But of course, as we know, the global north has lots of capitalists and lots of, like, exploited workers, And the global south has way more in poverty and exploited workers but also has some capitalists and stuff like this. 

Speaker 1: So it reminds me of 80s style 80s and 90s style malice third worldism, but rebranded as an ecological There are these overlaps. 

Speaker 2: That is absolutely true. 

Speaker 1: Which is interesting to me because you know I have always been like, yes, the in some broad scale, from a world systems perspective, the periphery devours the core. 

Speaker 1: But I want to remind you that even in Wallerstein, the periphery is not a nation and it's most definitely not a region. 

Speaker 1: It's specific places and specific classes within those places And then peripheries geographically, both between nations but also within them, and we see this in the south, the rust belt, the industrial Midwest, yeah, and look, i don't think I was reading today about some botched liver transparent policy where, like New York and California were really benefiting And but, like everywhere else in the country, was really not and things had gotten worse. And I'm like that's the worst kind of thing that we need is to make it look like that, like we can only fix urban problems by basically parasiting off of every place else. So they're like, in that sense, there needs to be equalization and it also needs to happen between nations, but that does not mean you can't develop, particularly if we're talking about development that requires the development of new resources, technologies and infrastructure and use of technologies that we currently have. Yeah, i mean, yes, i say this looking at a pair of headphones that are wireless and, like I would be nice if we weren't wasting lithium, i'm making everything wireless. It probably doesn't need to be. 

Speaker 2: That would be great It would be nice if we could decide things collectively like that, like, do we need those wireless headphones or do we want to devote social resources to other, more important ends? And I think the D-Growthers agree with that. They want to like when you push them, it's very clear they want to grow a lot of things. right. They want to grow some good things like public transit and healthcare and education and stuff, and they want to D-Grow the bad sort of like useless consumer stuff that we've been talking about. So What kind of we Exactly? So there's no reason to call it. 

Speaker 2: D-Growth. There's no reason to make these aggregate claims about the global North must D-Grow? But I hate to say it, but it's become almost a branding thing where they have to cling to the term D-Growth, which the other book in that New Left Review piece I review is called the Futures D-Growth, and they actually, to come credit, they review all the people that say you really shouldn't be calling this D-Growth And they're like, yeah, so we get this, but we're still going to call it D-Growth. So they review it. but they double down. They say we think it's like some counter hegemonic thing, because they see, the hegemony today is like growth. Right, there's this growthism and we all just fetishized GDP growth and we just think if growth is up, like society's doing well and In some ways they're right? 

Speaker 1: No, they're absolutely right, but it's more than just hegemonic Capitalism doesn't work if the growth is not up. Yeah, absolutely. 

Speaker 2: And but it's almost grumpy sometimes to argue that like you can get a counter hegemony. That's like by negating the existing ideology you're almost reinforcing the power structure that it represents. And I think there's something like that going on where, like, growth is like an ideological mystification of class society, where it's sort of it's this statistical construction that kind of says like, well, if this thing's going up, then everyone's doing well, right, But it's not true, right. It's like you can have GDP growth where it's a lot of profits for capital and the working class is getting really not doing so well. So this ideological mystification of growth then becomes a whole platform for another sort of counter movement that negates that mystification, And so they're on the terrain of mystification. That's one of the arguments I try to make. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, to kind of wrap this up, but I think this is a great point. This is actually my whole thing. It's like I've argued with both Lee Phillips and the grophers about this. It's like can we just quit talking about it in these terms, because it's not helpful. I've often told I've said this to anti-imperialists too and pissed them off as well Like just flipping a dishonest narrative, even if elements of that dishonest narrative are true. 

Speaker 1: You know like. You know the US wants to be dominant, the US is dominant. We need to fight that. Flip it. Okay, where I'm like, yeah, but by flipping it, you're actually still letting it. A set your agenda in a lot of ways, exactly, yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 1: And B, you're not addressing the fact that, like there's a mixed character to that whole thing, and flipping the mixed character means that you also have imported and inverted other things in it that may have been true or untrue, yes, and gotten stuck with that. You know, like with you when I hear like we need, like, a larger inclusion in agriculture, you know people working in agriculture and I'm like we need a more fair, equitable development of agriculture than in terms of, like, urban agriculture and all that stuff. But and in that sense I may agree with you, but I still think it's gonna be like three to 5% of the population engaged in that because we have dealt with most of technological problems of agriculture, we no longer need 80% of the population to be engaged in it, and I would love to not be wasting fossil fuels on bullshit So that we could use it for stuff like medicine and growing food, like that's where you guys have been. But when you're just like, when there's this ambiguity where you're like okay, do you mean just growing some things and not others? Do you mean being like? when you talk about de-growing and all from growing the south, i'm like, if you mean fair development, if we're not in that nation-state competition for resources, i kind of think people are inclined towards that. 

Speaker 1: If, like, the reasons why we aren't inclined to start development is usually because we are put in an artificial situation where we have to compete for resources in natural areas that we wouldn't normally have to compete, and that's even true within the United States, like States competing for water rights in irrational ways that if we didn't have arbitrary-ass state lines, we wouldn't be doing So it's. Those are the kinds of problems that I think we really could Like we just need to answer it with a third thing, but like, okay, this is what we mean by green socialism Go, which I also think would look different from most of the green parties in the world, frankly. So, but yeah, so thank you for coming on the show. I really enjoyed. I'm gonna pitch your book one more time. You don't have any other books, right? 

Speaker 2: I do have another one I wrote in 2013. It's about oil and American suburbanization and that being the kind of framework that powered the rise of the right and neoliberalism in the US. 

Speaker 1: So Oh well, that's people should check that out. Would you be interested in coming back on and talking about why suburbs are evil? No, i'm kidding, i actually don't know that I think suburbs are evil. 

Speaker 2: Well, if you wanna abolish town and country, it kinda looks probably kinda like sort of suburbs everywhere. 

Speaker 1: I don't know what it looks like, to be honest, but My best example for what town and country the abolishing town and country was like actually is an accident of the Korean geography, and I was you would go, because there's so little arable land in Korea and arable land is so important. There's this movement to build like high rises with walkable, like grocery stores, and all this in rural areas. So That's cool And there's not a lot of places on earth that are like that. But I'm like that's cool, that makes sense. You have you have a lot of the advantages of centralization. You have a walkable place, people are not having to like drive stupid pickup trucks all over the place And and yet there's a lot more green land than a country without a lot of land. Like there's just like, particularly because of the stuff with the North and half the country's mountains, you don't have a lot And I was like this is an example of even a crappy capitalist society that has figured out something that we could actually import into ours And it's a lot less alienating than people think because while you don't have like your own little yard, you have a lot of access to like public parks and everyone can use them And like there's. 

Speaker 1: You know, there people don't get all up and about people growing food in public parks. You can do a whole lot of stuff with that And I make it sound like South Korea is post a capitalist utopia and absolutely isn't kind of awful in a one of ways. But that thing was like, and I'm like, we have some of this technology. Now we're not looking at it Like and I don't. You know, i'm one of these people who, like the reason why the sub-bibers are cause we never really built any other infrastructure for them, but roads, like, like and built a lot of roads. 

Speaker 2: We were good at that. 

Speaker 1: Shit ton of roads But and threw a lot of cars at them, but like if they were set up differently they wouldn't be so bad. I don't think. I mean it's not, and they were also kind of designed in an alienating manner. But I don't think, like I'm also not a person who's like we need huge tracks of like prairie just to be there. I mean, i do think we do have to like I'm not opposed to protecting wildlife and stuff like that People don't, but don't at me. But I do think that these are things that we could do that also, because otherwise you're gonna have a permanent like political divide. That's kind of a reflective of a quasi-class divide between town and country, and I don't without dealing with those infrastructure issues. I don't know how you fix that, And that's plagued socialism and capitalist societies for literally 400 years. 

Speaker 2: Like it's a tough one. 

Speaker 1: It's like a big fucking problem. Yeah, that's true, and it's a problem that we used to be like well, it's the peasants. We're like we don't have peasants anymore And we still have this problem. So like we have to think about this in a big way, and that does require building a lot of shit It really does, and there's gonna be no way not to And it's also gotta be a long project, right, like it can't be something you do overnight. But to fight climate change, you do have to start thinking about ways that we could do it fairly fast but also very durably, and that's an important thing. 

Speaker 1: Because I'm like you think that, like what's currently happening is our capitalist overlords think that they're just be able to hang out on their you know whatever, while things get real bad and waited out, and I'm sort of like, well, you want that not to happen, you have to make them think they're gonna go down with us. So Yeah, and I don't know much about the way we're talking about degrowth. That really would scare them. 

Speaker 2: So No, i don't think they're scared by degrowth at all. But I agree with you We need like a worker-peasant alliance for the 21st century. It's some sort of version of that, so. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, thank you, Matt for coming on. Thanks for having me. 

Speaker 2: It's great Pleasure. 

Speaker 1: I enjoyed talking to you, even if I talked a lot for an interview No no, it's a great talking with you. All right, have a good night, all right. 

Speaker 2: Take care, take care Okay.