About the Book
Max Ajl – ‘A People’s Green New Deal’. The idea of a Green New Deal has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal? In this concise book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, their ideological underpinnings, and their limitations. Ajl goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a ‘People’s Green New Deal’ committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.
Resources
In this episode we interview Max Ajl, author of the new book A People’s Green New Deal.
Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to a number of journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society
In this discussion we talk to Ajl about his critiques of various forms of climate policy emanating from the capitalist and imperialist ruling class, and he situates the AOC/Markey Green New Deal as sharing a great deal ideologically and in terms of program with other capitalist so-called solutions to the climate crisis.
What Ajl advocates instead is an anti-colonial perspective, and a total infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and strong solidarity movements and convergences with climate proposals coming from the Global South, such as those laid out in the Cochabamba People’s Accords.
We strongly recommend this book as key to framing what a liberatory horizon can be for climate struggle on the left.
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Max Ajl, sociologist and author, joins Breht to discuss his book “A People’s Green New Deal”.
Topics Discussed: the liberal Green New Deal, the history of colonialism, eco-modernism, climate reparations, the Cochabamba’s Peoples Agreement, degrowth, ecosocialism, agroecology, the national question, Green Capitalism, and much more.
Max’s work: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Max-Ajl
Max’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxajl
Schedule:
Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (57 pages) - Sept 11th | Chapter 3, Chapter 4 (42 pages) - Sept 18th | Chapter 5, Chapter 6 (47 pages) - Sept 25th | Chapter 7, Conclusion (24 pages) - October 2nd
I have grown to deeply deeply hate the Gates Foundation, what a bunch of gross human monsters.
Anybody that reads the book is going to be in for a treat struggle session on vegetarianism and veganism for climate change.
Literally listening to the RevLeft interview with the author just now and got to that part literally seconds before seeing this post,
This is the first work of, I guess political economy that I’ve read, so there were some terms that were confusing to me. Thank you to everyone that answered my questions on the perusall!
I suppose it’s to be expected with a piece of political economy, but I almost feel like this is written slightly more verbosely than it has to be? I’ve become a big proponent these days of writing for the widest audience possible - it’s one thing to not ‘dumb down’ ideas, but another to use plain language. Felt like he reached for the thesaurus a little bit while writing this, not sure if anyone else noticed it.
Otherwise it’s a great little treatise so far, I don’t think there’s so much in the first few sections that will be news to most of us, coming from an already left perspective - the fact that AOC and Bill Gates shouldn’t be the horizons of vision when it comes to solving the climate catastrophe should already be apparent.
The centering of climate change and climate change ‘solutions’ as an expression of imperialism is brilliant, really something that should be stressed. The idea of unequal exchange not just of commodities but of emissions is great.
I’m really trying hard to be less doomer on climate at the moment. I feel like this book gets across the gravity of the situation without being paralysingly bleak.
I really liked the perspective of the atmosphere undergoing an enclosure type of control by the imperialist core and that we need to frame the discussion like that from now on.
I was pretty horrified at the idea of walling off nature into “carbon sink forests” or “nature preserves” while every lives in a bleak ass city with no parks and no decommodified public spaces. It makes the chinese city designs that popped up in /c/urbanism, even more exciting.
This quote made shudder. He is discussing some of the financial and ecological engineering being discussed amongst the wealthy elite and their priests. And what they think they can get away.
To put a green spin on such world-scale ecological-financial engineering, hand-of-god fantasies about Half Earth are gaining ground, imagining half of “Nature” immured from hordes of polluting souls - annoying human components of the “Anthropocene” — through wide-scale conversion of human-inhabited areas to CO2-drawdown farms and fortress conservation in which the wealthy world can luxuriate through luxe safaries, while clustering humans into the other half
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