Why Environmentalism Failed (Ft. Matt Huber)

I've never been as a client. I always found him very annoying, but like some of the hate he got

made me sympathetic than he said, he did the abundance thing and like the hate wasn't about the

neoliberal aspect, which is where I'm more critical of like this kind of Silicon Valley neoliberal

vision, he seems to have of abundance, but many were critical of the notion, like just of the notion

itself. And they're like, no, we need less abundance, not more abundance. I'm thinking, well,

listen, he's at least trying to like respond to Trumpism with something that doesn't sound like

shit. Yeah, and also something that just isn't orange man bad, right? You know, like actually

having a vision where the government could actually deliver things for people. And so people say,

oh, it's deregulation. And I think they're also open opening to making it easier for private sector

actors to build housing or build energy or whatever. So they're not, they're not socialist. Let's

be clear. But they also, I think at a fundamental level, like there's a whole chapter on how government

should be able to fund health and medical research more effectively. Like why was it that the woman

who developed mRNA vaccines, which were, you know, life changing and this apparently saved all

millions of lives, that woman like actually wasn't able to get funding from the government to fund

her research. And she was actually like, aligned by Pfizer was like sort of like consigned to a

basement. Like the kid. And it wasn't paid very well. So anyways, yeah, I think there's a lot of

value in their approach. And yes, they're trying to advance a positive vision for the left and not

just one that's a about just blocking stuff we don't like or be about vote for us because the other

other party is evil and horrible and fascist. So that I think is good. But of course,

what we try to argue in the article is that, you know, the socialist movement, you don't have to be

fully automated luxury communism. But it was always about delivering abundance or at least

material comfort to all of humanity. Right. And that what Capitalism really does is create

the material capacity for abundance by developing the productive forces. But what Capitalism does

is kind of create this kind of artificial scarcity where millions sort of live in austerity

and scarcity and don't have access to all this abundance and that what socialism is really just

like I said before, like extending these material benefits to all of humanity. I want more

housing. I want more energy. I want more science development. That's the kind of stuff that the

book is really trying to get us. You are listening to OneDime Radio. Become a patron at patreon.com

slash OneDime to support the show and get access to extra content. I'm not saying I'm going to

rule the world or I'm going to change the world. But I guarantee that I will spot the brain that

will change the world. And that's our job. We might not be the ones, but let's not be selfish.

And because we're not going to change the world, let's not talk about how we should change it.

By moderately conservative, I mean simply, before you act, think well about all possible consequences.

Author's call someone a relativist, by which I mean it's a person that holds that any views

as good as any other views. No one believes that every view is as good as every other view.

You want to do politics. You got to fucking understand the issues. It's not all just emotions

and fantasy life. Remember my friend, a wise man can learn more from a few years question

and a few can learn from a wise answer.

Welcome to OneDime Radio. Today I'm here with Matt Huber, author of the book, Climate Change

as Class War. Genuinely, I think one of the best books on the subject of climate change to come

out from left wing spaces in a long time. And I say that seriously because it's not just

a bunch of proposals, a bunch of stuff we already know about why climate change is bad and why it's

happening. But addressing, you know, not just giving proposals, but addressing some of the

serious questions as to why has the climate change failed so catastrophically. And I think that's

something to just take in for a moment before we begin because it has always been annoying to me

the way in which parts of the liberal progressive side have monopolized the discourse on

climate change and have kind of made it unpopular and thus sort of

turned so many people off of it. What off of what should be one of the most important issues

of this time and will be of the future.

We have to recognize that not only has it not been optimal.

I think straight up, the climate change movement has gotten worse than I envisioned.

And that was already very pessimistic. In the sense that even the liberals are dropping it.

I mean, it's quite shocking like now the liberal party of Canada is adopting policies

akin to the conservative party of Canada with regard to just doubling down on,

you know, all the all the same things you see increasingly even liberal elites who

at one point were willing to, you know, pay lip service to this issue are kind of now dropping it.

You're just we're entering this weird period it seems of, you know, honestly, like climate

denialism or just everything is fine. Yeah, it's hard. It's it's it's pretty dark.

But you know, this big is a question like why are so many people because we have to admit that

it isn't a very pie. This is one of the issues with that. It's very close to my heart.

It's the one that I know one of the issues I've not shifted rightward on whatsoever.

But it's one of these issues. It's one of the like a lot of the issues I believe and I believe

are popular. This is one of the issues that I admit. I think leftist socialist struggle to make

popular. But it's one I think that it involves how we talk about it. And the central theme of your

book is centering class as a very important factor in this issue of climate change. I mean,

first off, beyond the obvious like capitalism causes climate change, which is, you know,

something a lot of listeners of this show probably have heard. What felt you compelled first off

to like, you know, feel a gap in the discourse? Well, the first thing you were talking about,

which as you suggested, has gotten even worse since the book came out that the climate

movement was failing spectacularly. I mean, emissions just keep coming up and temperatures keep

rising. And so I really wanted to confront that failure head on and try to think strategically

about how we could shift the climate politics in a significant way. And so from, I think, well,

we can talk more about this later. But the basic argument is that it is, it's very unpopular

in a climate activists tend to espouse the politics that's kind of inherently kind of moralistic.

And it's oftentimes kind of seems antagonistic to the larger masses of ordinary working people

in most societies. And so that was kind of the epithets. You know, I just, when I started thinking

about the book, I just had my first child, my only child, she's now 10. But, you know, thinking

about the world she's going to inherit, she's going to become, she's going to reach retirement age

in 2080. And thinking about what the planet will look like then just made me angry and wanting to

really like critique the climate movement for its failures, right? So, and also, I'm a Marxist,

I've been a Marxist for decades now. And it really struck me that, you know, there was this

course at the time and there still is of climate change, as you said, like it's caused by capitalism,

which sounds profound, but doesn't really tell us much. But more, more sort of mainstream

and liberal commentators would often say that climate change was a problem of inequality,

class, even class inequality, even outlets like Jacobin would publish things like climate

change as a class struggle. But when they talked about class, they were only talking about

climate impacts in terms of basically rich people have higher carbon prints than poor people,

so that this very like consumption based in lifestyle based analysis of sort of responsibility

for climate change, which is ultimately rooted in people's income and consumption practices.

And so, that struck me that that vision of class based in income and consumption and lifestyle

is not a Marxist analysis of class at all. It's a very not Marxist because, of course, Marxists

think about class in terms of your relation to production and, you know, the relationship to

the means of production and more not about what you consume, but how you actually generate the

money that makes consumption possible. And so, that analysis really took me like we really

should be focusing on class climate as a class problem because it's really about how we organize

production and particularly industrial production in our society. And that kind of the

relations of ownership and power over production are what is driving the climate crisis. And therefore,

we're going to have to think about how to build a kind of movement that would actually be able

to confront the power of those owners who don't just like, you know, eat steak or drive a big car,

like they spend most of their day like operating huge global networks of fossil fuel intensive

production and they're and they make profit doing like that activity is way more consequential

when it comes to climate change. And so, you know, like it almost like want it made me want to just

go back to sort of classical Marxist class analysis where, you know, there's a minority of people

who own and control production who are profiting off this. And then there's the vast majority of

society who doesn't own a lot and that's to sell their labor power for a wage and and therefore

that larger majority of working class people does not have any power for decision making control

over these systems of production, particularly like the electricity grid or

or again, these big carbon intensive production systems that are really driving the problem. And

yes, working class people do consume in a way that creates a mission, but they really are,

they really have any power over those systems of production that are really at the heart of the

crisis. And so, so it really struck me as there was a real opening to just, I mean, literally,

that I don't think many people were talking about the climate crisis in this very Marxist class

terms focused on production. And of course, the other part of the book is really trying to say that

if we want to win, we need a kind of mass working class politics to confront this problem.

And again, I think the failure of the climate movement has always been, and this is only

intensified in the last few years, just sort of inability to resonate with the larger masses

of working people. And as you said, like it's just not a popular issue that people care about,

right? And I think there's a lot of reasons for that, but a lot, one reason is just because of

the way in which climate activists kind of approach the issue, talk about the issue, and advocate

around it. Yeah, I noticed the pattern of the only political parties that are left wing that

have succeeded electorally in any capacity are ones that sort of prioritize the bread and butter

issues and abandon a bunch of issues that were not as popular with the working class. You know,

a lot of social issues, but unfortunately, tendencies within these same parties is to also put

climate issues that kind of set them aside. Like I saw this with Amlo in Mexico, that's one of my

big critiques of them is that I think their environmental policy is terrible. It was a problem with

Morales. It was also, it's also a problem with even like the kind of splits you see now in

European left wing parties, like there's some who are finally getting the message to like, you know,

maybe meet people where they're at a little bit, but then they're also kind of moving right

word on climate, which by just kind of accepting like this sort of, yeah, this kind of not even

really dealing with the problem, frankly. And as you said, part of why I think this has been so

why climate changes not an issue that has resonated with the working class or just the broader

majority. And you'd think it would. I mean, it's just like conserving your habitat is one of the most

vital things. It's a thing that you'd even think conservatives would care about conserving

your place. I mean, they will be very, they'll be very, they'll be very concerned about

conserving their civilization when it comes to mass immigration, but they won't want to conserve

literal like civilization. And it's, and it's actual infrastructure. It's a homeland and environment.

And why is that? I mean, it's like the big thing, yeah, as you mentioned, is just the way in which

so much of the discourse has been about telling people what and what to consume, like telling people

who often can't afford like organic food or can't eco friendly stuff about how they need to

make the right choices. And yeah, this might have been like a liberal progressive thing.

But I did see it on the left too, because even because you mentioned, you know, yours is the

one of the few like Marxist analysis of this subject. I would say it's one of the few real Marxist

analysis of the subject. Because there was a lot of these other like neo-Marxian, you know, new left

sort of analysis of climate that would talk about capitalism, but it would still only talk

about consumption. It would mainly talk about consumption. And it would say how the global north

just needs to get influenced. Yes. Why is production so much more important than consumption?

Not only in terms of like why consumption focusing on consumption is it's not practical

electorally, like, or just practically at all you can't just get people to magically stop consuming

or consuming more eco friendly way. Why is it that like focusing on production is where you get

at the heart of the matter as well in terms of solving the problem? Okay, I'll get to that.

But you can go. Yeah, no, I'll get to that in a sec, but I wanted to talk what you were saying

before, which is it's really strange to me that particularly on amongst liberals and even the left,

like somehow, you know, there's been all this talk now. We got to return to cost of living,

affordability, and material issues, right? And somehow I think the right word turn near

suggesting is because people are saying, well, climate is just a cultural issue. It's just this sort

of, you know, you know, like many other cultural issues not sort of based in the material, but

it's like you couldn't get a more material issue as you're suggesting the client. I mean, not only

is it about like the kind of existential habitability of humanity, but it's also, you know,

if we went about this the right way, you might notice that like most of working class people sort of

sort of basic material needs are things like transportation, energy, housing, food. These are all

the sectors that we need to decarbonize, right? And so there could be a way to approach those

sectors in a way that could, you know, benefit working class people, but also decarbonize the sectors.

And all the while we're a lot of activists and progressives have treated it like a cultural issue,

they treated that way because they make it really more about the science, right? And believing the

science and following the science and and and and and so forth. But when you look at the climate

politics really for the last, I would say 20 years, but really intensified it in sort of the Obama

era is that actually if you want to look at who's using class language and class politics to fight

climate change is the right, you know, the right is always talking about, you know, what climate

policy is trying to do is raise your cost of energy, hurt your, you know, damage your livelihood,

ruin jobs, you know, make us less competitive globally. They they have a like laser focus on economics

as what climate change is about, right? And the left is often the clouds talking about climate as

like, you know, a scientific issue or and and and the other people I profile in the book are what

I call the policy technocrats who literally want to raise the price of energy through things like

carbon pricing and carbon taxes, which I know recently had a decline there in Canada because of

these political reasons, which is it's so easy for the right to paint climate activists as trying

to make your life worse when literally their main policy program is raising the price of energy

through carbon tax, which, you know, you can do all sorts of like redistribution of the funds and

try to make it better for the poor and all this stuff, but ultimately when you call something

attacks and you ultimately want to raise the price of energy, you're going to just it's a layup

for the right. Okay, so we can talk about those types of dynamics more later, but production is

literally like if you look at the intergovernmental panel on climate change where they sort of trace

emissions, you know, just straight off the bat, the largest sector of emissions is industrial

productions that that is stuff like steel, cement, chemicals, these sectors like you know,

you would have to multiply your own little carbon footprint by tens of thousands of times to like

equal one of these industrial facilities. The other major source of emissions is electricity,

right? And what's interesting about, you know, the politics of production versus consumption

there is, you know, you and me can be running our air conditioners or blow dryers and being

inefficient in consumption. And really, it doesn't really matter what we're doing. What really

matters is how the electric electricity grid is organized in terms of low carbon or zero carbon

production, right? So I often tell this example that, you know, in Quebec actually, they use like

really inefficient heating systems like the electrical resistance heating, you know,

baseboard heating, and they're just cranking it up in the winter when it's cold because they have

so much cheap hydroelectric power, which is, you know, from a climate perspective, pretty,

it's fine, right? You can just do that. But another example, I'd be East Germany in the communist

area where they had really efficient energy consumption, they had math transit, they had, you know,

dense public housing and people were really frugal with their energy, but the entire society is

powered by coal, right? So, you know, regardless of what consumers are doing, the climate

outcome of their consumption is really bad. So really, you know, the decisive factor is how you

organize the production of electricity. And that, and again, those decisions are not democratic,

like we'd want them to be in a real socialist society. So, but what was the next thing? Oh,

so the other major source of emissions in the world are what is sort of glunked together,

I think it's called land use in agriculture and forestry, right? And all of those forms of

emissions are also rooted in production, like largely agricultural, and, you know, marginal amounts

for forestry production, stuff like livestock production, all these kinds of things. So again,

and again, like in a capitalist society that the people that own the means of production are very

small minority, and they're the ones with the power, they're the ones who are profiting off

these emissions in the climate crisis. And it's almost like, you know, British petroleum invented

the whole concept of a carbon footprint, and they've kind of like successfully convinced everyone

that climate changes is really this diffuse thing where it's all up to some individual carbon

footprints and and all this type of stuff, but it really is not. It's it's really concentrated in

the power of who organizes this production, and actually, you know, that doesn't make it any

easier politically to overcome the power of those people, but it's at least a little more straightforward

politics where again, you can be very clear that no, this isn't about all of us. This is about them

who are causing this crisis, and we need to build power to kind of really transform these energy

systems in a dramatic way, which would basically mean eroding their power significantly. So

so that's that's the short story of why production really matters.

Why can't we return to green industrial productions like the many green advocates of scene

advocates, you know, not just really fringe ones. I mean, a lot of left ones and they left

allersers I've seen, you know, calls for I mean, some of them are more rational than others. I

mean, there's like a lot of appeal to like permaculture. Yep. Or you know, these kind of local

ways of producing, you know, what is to be done with the question of production?

You know, I used to be one of these deep green, you know, I don't know if you familiar with

something called deep ecology, but I was really down that. Sorry. Marie Bookchin. Yeah,

I was in the Marie Bookchin, but even more sort of crazy. I was into this, this guy named Derek

Jensen, who was all about like sort of, you know, like abandoning industrial civilization kind of

like sabotaging it if we can and in any event. Out of that, I kind of, I became, I got more

interested in Marxism and I got more interested in his, you know, historical materialism. I started

thinking about like, you know, what is shaped history in terms of like the productive forces

and technology and things like this. And then I became really interested in energy history and

fossil fuels and how like capitalism became sort of reliant on fossil fuels and what that meant.

There's this really famous energy geographer. That's what my field is named Voclav Smil, who

writes these just incredibly, I would call them materialist technical books about sort of,

you know, how much energy does it take to farm and to produce and, you know, really crunches

the numbers and shows all the stuff. But one thing from his work and others that just hit me

where they showed that, you know, prior to 1800, almost all work energy-wise that had to get

done in society had to be done by muscle power, right? By basically either humans or increasingly

animals, right? And so that put some real physical constraints on what you would call the

productive forces, right? And so what the sort of shift to fossil fuels was not only about shifting

to a different energy source, which it was, but also about coupling that incredibly dense energy

source underneath the ground with automatic machinery that that replaced muscle power,

basically for all kinds of production. And so once I sort of, you could start to see that like

machinery, you know, this is what we call the industrial revolution, but it's really an energy

revolution. It happened that we basically were able to go from a society where again 90% of people

are working horrific agrarian type of manual labor just to reproduce the material conditions

of society, right? And it became, you know, you didn't have to think very hard to realize,

okay, that was a much worse society, right? And that, and also just, you know, given the way

in which industrial production has also led to this sort of, and not just industrial production,

but all sorts of things have led to this demographic explosion where we now have 8 billion people

on the planet, like we could not return to, you know, we can't have 8 billion people doing

permaculture just with that work, right? And the last thing that really blew my mind was when

I realized again, not just that we replaced muscle power with machinery, but we also basically

mechanized an industrialized agriculture to the extent that almost no one in industrial societies

now has to work in agriculture where in the United States and probably similar in Canada,

in 1900 still, like 40% of the workforce was working in agriculture. And because of industrialization,

like now it's at like 1%, right? And just, you just, again, you don't have to think very hard

to realize like we can't go back. There's no political path to returning to a world in which 40%

of people are working on farms. And trust me, like, it's not a, it's a skewed sample, but I always,

and when I teach, I teach these big lecture classes with 200 students, and I always ask like how

many of you would like to be a farmer, right? And, you know, it's always like two out of 200, right?

It's, so these are the material conditions that face us, which I think if you're a historical

materialist in your Marxist, you have to kind of face the material conditions of possibility

politically that you are facing. And, and so, yeah, there's no possibility to kind of return to

peasant pace agriculture or God forbid. I mean, certainly, obviously, like we're not going to go

back to 4G and our hunter gathering. And so the, the real thing is to, to see actually,

fossil fuels are causing climate, climate change in that horrific, but they've also,

I wrote a chapter called fossilized liberation that wasn't tried to argue that like they've

actually liberated humanity in all these significant ways. And so if we're going to get

off fossil fuels, we're going to have to learn how to build a new society on the basis of that

in liberation, right? On the basis of that, of those productive forces. And that, and again,

that just takes me back to just going to just sort of basic classical Marxist theory, right,

which is that any new society, be it communist or socialist, is going to come out of, as he called it,

the womb of the previous society that came before it, right? And so that, I think, is just

pretty basic. And I actually think the climate crisis kind of really hammers home Marxist kind of

original, what, what is called the feathering thesis of like a certain point in history where

the productive forces need to develop, right? But the social relations of production are holding

it back, right? And you can't develop those productive forces unless what he called a revolution,

an era of revolution happens. And to me, the kind of the climate crisis is evidence that yeah,

like we need a totally new energy system, despite all the good things that fossil fuels though

brought. And the private capitalist organization of production and energy sector more specifically

is holding us back from developing this, you know, lower zero carbon economy. So

let's, let's get into exactly, you know, what that looks like. Because there's a few things in

your analysis that I would like to spell out. So that's it. And you can like elaborate on each and

every one of them. So one of the major things that I learned, like the new things that I learned

from your book was the whole part about nitrogen fertilizer. And like this central role that that

has in, you know, creating, creating, I mean, a system that's just exponentially more emissions.

And the incentives of the system in that when it comes to cost and value surplus value, you put

it and you wrap that into it as well. When it comes to alternative energy systems,

you support nuclear, find wind by itself to be not a reliable only if you rely only on wind and

solar. So that sets you apart from the kind of, you know, anti-globalization activists who,

I mean, the mentality is still there. You still see it. People who are anti-nuclear.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And also just this general approach of wanting to build new, like a new green

industrialization, I saw somebody criticize it as a prometian. So, you know, yeah, what exactly,

you know, because if we, how come so many people think we can go back, you know, whether it's to

like a local scale production, or you'd just like Thomas Jefferson's agrarian, you know, Utopia,

sort of like a one-class society of petty producers, right? Yeah, why can't we do that? And

why, how did you come to the positions that you have when it comes to energy? We can maybe elaborate

on them. Yeah, I mean, I, again, I think just studying the history and what I think has happened

is we've, we have entered this kind of post-industrial society, at least in, you know, the global North.

And what I, what I, and we, we've increasingly, you know, I argue this in the book that we

increasingly shifted to what is kind of called the knowledge economy or the, you know, information

economy and people have called that sort of the dematerialization of the economy and all this kind

of stuff. What I think that has resulted in is that people obviously, through no fall of their

own, have, are just, have lots of touch with the just unbelievable transformations that happened in

the 19th and early 20th century with regard to industrialization, right? It just, people just take

it for granted now. They don't realize that, you know, can 150 years ago, just to give an example

in the United States that like a quarter of all cropland was to grow food for working animals on

farms, right? So you needed that much land just to grow the food to feed the, the, the, the mules and

the horses and the, and the, and the oxen or whatever who are doing all the work on the farms and that,

and that took up so much land just to feed the animals. And then all of a sudden you get tractors

and you don't need that land anymore at all. So that's, and then, you know, kids, kids today,

like some of my students, geez, I mean born after 2000, like that, you know, they just wake up in a

world of tractors and mass production and, and, and, you know, like, and that's just the world

they live in. And, and of course, they also live in a world of TikTok videos of like climate

crisis is here and we're all going to die. And I think like again, I went through this for

a decade, at least of my life where it's just like your initial reaction was like the industrial

system is bad and wrong and we need to just shut it down and, and, and, and kind of go back to

kind of a more wholesome local way of life, right? And so I think like, yeah, it's a very understandable

sort of knee jerk reaction, right? But I think it takes took me again, like decades of sort of

studying history to realize like, for, first of all, like, again, those transformations were very

positive in many ways and created all this sort of, you know, just look at child mortality rates,

life expectancy, all these things had improved, even in poor countries have improved considerable

degrees. And, and, and it was much worse before, right? So, and so you sort of quickly realized like,

yeah, we're not going back. But, but again, and, and even in the, in the period of industrialization,

where you did have like Marxist parties, socialist parties, worker parties, like I think those

people were participating in this industrial transformation and saw it as this incredibly

liberatory technology that was like emancipating humanity. And what they wanted to do was seize it

for their own kind of purposes to kind of emancipate humanity as a whole. And that's what I think

really inspired a lot of Marxist and communist throughout the 20th century was like they felt like

they're part of this historical movement to kind of actually seize the, the benefits of capitalism

which were being hoarded by the capitalist class and extend them and really generalize them

to all of humanity, right? Even Lenin talking about communism being like electrification of the

whole country, right? So, so this is, this is how people saw the kind of trajectory of history and

material conditions and industrialization up until I would say like you were hinting at up until

kind of the post-World War II and then definitely into the 1970s and the new left and kind of,

you know, this new left kind of in Skonston, the knowledge economy and kind of was so removed from

industrialization that they just saw it as a source of harm and injustice and something that needed

to be just torn down or blocked or sort of held back, right? And I think only in the last few

years as people have really come to grips with the fact that we still are a world that's 80%

powered by fossil fuels and creating a non-fossil fuel power world would create like you said earlier,

like a level of green industrialization that would be like a massive infrastructure building

project. It would be a lot of investment, a lot of building of new stuff and rearranging how

people live and it would be a level of kind of industrialization that people just aren't used to

and if people are used to anything they're used to kind of just like blocking it and liking it or

and so and so it's a real conundrum of how you can actually create and you know a certain

environmentalists are starting had started to come to grips with this like even someone like

Bill McKibben who I'm very very critical of wrote an essay a couple years ago that was called

Yes in My Backyard where like we actually start we need to build you know solar farms and wind farms

wherever we can and we can't be nimbis we can't be blocking stuff we have to build build build right

so they're starting to kind of to to get that and of course the Bidenomics vision of kind of

industrial policy and kind of you know this sort of a smitten oriented building oriented union

or even was kind of starting and you know we can talk about Ezra Klein and abundance and that kind

of stuff people are starting to see like there's that kind of politics starting to coalesce right

but it's really budding up against this kind of decades of kind of post-industrial environmentalism

that's only knows how to oppose industrialization only knows only knows it as sort of bad and harmful

and problem I'll say to be fair to the new left is there were like because there's like the

there's like the higher points of the new left and the kind of like lower points of it

within some of the theorists who are associated with the new left who kind of were really

much older than that but would would have kind of wrote in that time there was still that

vision of like seizing on the fruits of modernity and using it to more a collective end like

Marcusa right Marcusa took that kind of classical analysis of wanting to build on you know the

technology that exists you had that with Andre Gorets to in these kind of like post-work-ish

visions which at least weren't anti-technology that was about how to use technology this sort of like

reactionary kind of turn because I mean that's what it is it really is reactionary in the

textbook's tense like rolling back the wheel of history I can understand reactionary impulses

but when reactionary impulses conflict with like objective reality you know it's just that I

one point is it's just naval gazing and so much of like there's this kind of fetish of

localism it's hard to imagine people returning to society where a larger percentage of the population

actually farmed given that what we have right now is like this real consumerism consumerist culture

both on the right and left with the I would say with generally speaking there's just a

fragility when it comes to prices you see like what affects populations the most is literally like

the price of their favorite pizza going up a couple dollars like that freaks people I mean I get

it because that's the real way in which their declining wealth has been masked the declining

wages has been masked by all this like all these cheap goods so it's but it's also there's a consumer

culture which I think is very much at odds with the kind of frankly work ethic that would be needed

for reindustrial reindustrialization like you think about what we would need not just on the left

but in cub western countries is honestly a more veberian kind of partisan work ethic to you know

reindustrialization it's kind of where I've cited more with the like

MMT people than I have with a lot of the people who you know this is where you know we mentioned

abundance by his recline and I'm sure you're critical of it as well or I'm critical of it as well

but I'm sure you've noticed as many people who are critical of it for kind of the wrong reasons

they're critical of it because they like don't like the idea of growth in this sense itself

they just like this small as beautiful vision whereas no actually we should want that vision but

better and not just like abundance in a consumerist sense in a sense of abundance of energy just like

going for whatever works that we cannot afford to be choosy what if yes due forms of energy at this

point because you think about the practicalities imagine if you had a left wing government and they

just they didn't have alternative energy sources they wouldn't be able to descale oil production

without fundamentally you know causing maybe an uprising like you look at Mark carney he was so

quick to like secure a deal with Alberta to allow them to produce more oil and because there's

a real threat of separation there and I can't even imagine like how the hell are they going to

descale oil you see like left left wingers in Canada will stay we want to get rid of

we want to get rid of oil production but without a plan to re-industrialize that would just

impoverish populations that are dependent on that right yeah I should say that I wrote up

with some friends of mine Lee Phillips and Fred Stafford we wrote a review of abundance that

was you know we were critical in the sense that you know we wanted a socialist vision of abundance

that much further but we might have been the only review on the left that did sort of see positive

stuff in there right like that yeah actually the we do need that what you know as our clients as

we need a liberalism that builds but we actually do like a left builds right and we need to we need

to actually deliver I mean that's what the books about it's like the government should actually

be to be able to deliver stuff if it promises it's going to build a bunch of high speed rail it should

actually do that effectively and not just get bogged down and all sorts of blockages right so

to me it was it was an important message that like a lot of the left and liberals needed to hear

and in fact I think their target audience in terms of criticism was the kind of degrowth

small as beautiful type people right so in any event what was the thing you said after that though

because I'm always getting uh uh well okay the the thing I was saying is that I remember hearing

all the time from the left in Canada the left in Canada was talking about how we need to get rid

of oil but yes and I you know I in part agree in the sense that for one our oil is particularly

horrific or the environment to get out it's not a very efficient type of oil

but it's basically Alberta's whole economy absolutely yeah and you would absolutely screw over

a lot of people's livelihoods by stopping that so unless you have like an alternative

form of energy I mean how would you prevent not not just like killing the Alberta's economy for

example but also all these other things that could happen if there's not a sufficient amount

like there's not the reliable source of energy to replace that because you could have just power

outages or these little dysfunctions in the economy that would basically cause people to start

losing things that they took for granted and that would probably cause a terrible reaction that

would at least seize power back to the right and then you would go back to three steps backward

again it's just yeah I mean how do we go how do we prevent that yeah and I think the right again

is easily able to seize on this because they can see that there's a real kind of just sort of

blase disregard for the consequences of of like shutting down all fossil fuel production

like I remember Hillard Clinton said that like we're gonna put all coal workers out of work

like she said we're gonna make you all unemployed like she said that and it decayed a big scandal

for her but she these are kind of like how people think that there's a sort of a derision and

disdain for the kind of a lot of the be honest like the blue collar workers that would be devastated by

this kind of transition if there isn't a real plan in place and so yeah like you you would need to

have a real sort of and that's why the book also tries to say like this transition has to be about

something socialist should care about which is planning right like if you are gonna shut down

fossil fuels we still rely on 80% of our energy for fossil fuel so how are you gonna replace that

and how is it gonna be a transition that doesn't cause these disruptions you're talking about

so I was really inspired in the book by a trading leader and environmentalist who came up with

the term just transition and his name is Tony Mizaki of the oil and chemical and atomic workers

and he actually he himself had benefited from the GI Bill which was this program to transition

veterans from world war two and into the civilian economy and give them all sorts of support

and stuff like this and he actually argued that's what we would need if we really care about the

environment we want to want to shut down dirty industries we have to like totally take care of

these workers in a very sort of systematic way like common demands would be like you know five

years of 100% income supports so that you actually have time to transition to a different career

free education so that you can you know a lot of just transition talk to like has sort of vague ideas

about retraining you're gonna retrain and you're you know end up in in the green economy somehow

but like real material supports like income supports and free education to that's the only way

that these workers would actually believe that there's that that that these political elites care

about them like if there's actual material have behind it because in reality you know apart from

Alberta which I think is still doing reasonably well like in the United States like coal mining

communities are just completely devastated and abandoned right there's no just transition

for these workers they've just been totally abandoned and so yeah and I and I think I think the

workers in those sectors really understand that the the kind of particularly the climate activists

in the political elites don't really care about what happens to their jobs or what happens to their

lives and that that's a real problem because those are the types of workers who skills

and trades are going to be crucial to that to that to rebuilding all the new stuff that needs to

replace fossil fuels right so these trading in this and I think it was Britain they were reacting

against climate activists were trying to do a typical thing like we're gonna ban all gas all natural

gas infrastructure by like 2025 we're gonna just phase out all the gas right and of course gas

is this whole network of infrastructure that employs huge amounts of pipe fitters and

boiler installers and natural gas technicians and so the trading in people came up with a slogan

that we don't want bands we want plans right and to me like that's the way more socialist answer

to the climate transition let's keep that I've got a slogan listeners just comment that and

we should always say that all the time I'm so sick of that I'm so sick of anti this anti capitals

anti that's deconstruct this bring down that fix build that's why people don't trust left

wingers to govern is when all they hear is college students with these slogans about tearing

things down and then you have academics who are I'm talking about because it's easy to critique

it's hard to build but that's that's what's needed and built the plus build gives people income it

gives people something you know tell us problems more than just more than just you know the climate

literally unemployment it's a big one I think to your point earlier like it it would take a work ethic

you know to to have skill to like be a pipe fitter or to be an electrician like it it actually

requires a lot of skill a lot of care a lot of a lot of training right but of course if those

sectors are unionized you would hope that they could create a not just good pain jobs which we know

they do but also like better work hours right like so you might have a more of a work ethic but

less work right if they're unionized and if they're again if there's a larger planning apparatus

is trying to distribute the work amongst the unions and amongst the workers in a rational way

it doesn't have to be this kind of drudgery of of of of millions of people having to work long hours

to kind of create the drink the green transition yeah I want to move on to the specifics of of energy

but on that note this ethic because before I forget I think that is something very very very

important actually because one consequence of this deindustrialization has been a sort of a

new sort of elite system in which the right and left and center are just kind of different forms

of elites where you have like you know the the right will represent capitalists that are usually

more landed or you know have industries that are opposed to progressive capital and then you

have liberals often in Canada you know we'll very much be supported by the finance industry but

they also be supported by a lot more global industries that prefer like free trade and stuff

the NDP which used to be the working class parties in pretty much the PMC party I would say it's

like fully captured at this point there's a battle now and I hope the labor labor candidate

Rob Ashton wins but you know he's up it's a uphill battle but he seems good yeah he seems like

I really like Rob Ashton he's great but you have this situation right now where

this professional class which it's work is in white color labor intellectual liquor it doesn't

want to do it doesn't really want to create a world where there's less of that and more of the

manual labor and because that's beyond it's why do people go to university it's often to kind of

go into something that has like higher status more social currency and there's this weird parallel

system that's been created I'm not sure to the extent with it how prevalent this is in the US it's

I've definitely seen it be prevalent in a lot of the big cities and it's in London but in Canada

it's becoming increasing like this where you have the people born in Canada increasingly they want

to go to college to get a white color job and they import a lot of migrants to do all the manual

labor and they've become very dependent on all the migrants to do the manual labor and then you'll

have on the one hand people will complain but then the left and liberal side will say well they're

doing the work don't you want that to be the case oh yeah or you have the guy in the English

green party candidate who said oh I don't want to be wiping somebody's bum or whatever he made

this like here really broad elitist defense of immigration

because it's like what would be required I think this is created a situation where people have

outsourced manual labor to migrants and the only way to fix the problem would either be to

double down on that and or to actually you know you would need to prime a lot of the population to

want to wanting to culturally do manual labor but also have the interests so that's like the

unionization I think the wages because when they say oh we need migrants to do this work because

people don't want to do it it's like no it's not that they don't want to do it they used to do it

a few generations ago so these don't want to do it for terrible wages right yeah yeah I think you're

exactly right that basically the base of the climate movement is this class whose whole

whole mission in life is to get credentials to avoid manual labor it's basically the whole

the whole project of the PMC so what's really interesting is that those those people tend to again

they tend to discover climate change as this again this sort of scientific problem that the

scientists have just you know shown that this and that is going to happen and we need to you know

I I pick on Bill McKibbin a lot the fact that he he started a social movement based on the number

parts per million in the atmosphere we need to get to to be safe as a planet 350 the social

movements called 350.org he he he he started a campaign that was called do the math tour where

he went around trying to tell people about like how many gigatons of carbon we have left to burn

and and what the carbon budget will show us like just like the most like you know like nerdy

technocratic ways to approach the climate problem is purely a problem of science and numbers and

so forth but the real tragedy I think is that all the people shouting about climate none of them

have the skills to do the work that we need to rebuild the industrial society we all take for granted

and live it right and so and you're starting to see this more and more where you hear about these

kind of PMC parents and they're kind of like bragging about their kids are not going to college and

they're going into the trades they're going to get like they're going to become electricians

are going to be union electricians and there's a I'm noticing like a new kind of cultural

valorization of this kind of path particularly if it is that kind of like high salary union path

right like I think middle class parents are like okay sure you can do manual work as long as like

it's very unionized and highly paid right but I hope so I hope so I'd like to say because I've

seen the opposite it's the parents always want to brag about somebody who's like not doing that

it's seen as like demeaning it's also yeah no that's I think the overwhelming majority or parents

want their kids to you know be knowledge workers or be doctors or you know be high status not like

sort of educated credential workers right but I do think there is this sort of new kind of

excitement about people because to be frank this is related because the PMC is like overrun universities

and kind of poison them in the larger public imagination like I think more and more people are

like well why should my kids go to university what if they could you know get get a decent living

by going into skilled trades right and so it's just a different narrative that's sort of taking

shape I guy yeah I agree I don't think it's like a majority narrative but it's starting to to be

there but ultimately I still think it's just amazing to me that like we have all these climate

activists and climate movements and they they just have no connection or relationship with

the industrial workers who are at the core of this problem and the core of the solution and in many

ways just as industrial workers are suspicious and kind of like think the climate activists are not

don't have their best interests and hard you know I talk to climate activists all the time who have

this real disdain for industrial workers they say they're captured by the bosses their you know

socialists talk about business unionists they're all kind of corrupted and they all

because they're high paid union workers they just live like this high consumption lifestyle and

don't get they don't care about the environment they don't care about climate so there's a real

disdain that goes both ways actually which is just it's again it's a tragedy because

if we had a powerful climate movement it would be number one the industrial unions and workers

would be leading the movement and number two there would be mutual admiration for both sides

of you know the more professional educated activists people and the the actual workers and

these sectors like electricity and and transport or whatever all these really highly relevant

climate sectors so well I think this is one of the big strong points of your book is that it's

one of the few that actually you know emphasize the PMC like the professional managerial class because

that is just something completely missing in a lot of the analysis like why is it not resonating

with people well it's you know it's not it's because it's coming from people from a completely

different habitat and it's yeah you said it you know about about knowing the science believing in

science that's the way I often heard it discuss like it's very common for people to go to

university and try to get like this was like because I grew up right in this world this is the

program that I went in your three paths where if you were like left leaning central leaning or

right leaning if you are right leaning your path was you know working for like a conservative

political party or in finance if you're a liberal it was to do liberal parties government like

lots of government job that's the majority of them were liberals or NDP left leaning where you

would work for an NGO and you would usually work for some kind of NGO that was very focused on

raising awareness not from this perspective that's the way they always talked about it they said

we just need to raise awareness tell people about climate change how to consume what to do

then I'll just like fix it and it's yeah how but like the thing is how how does like how do you

have a working class climate movement when the working class has so little so little power right

yeah and so that thing that's that that's a tough question absolutely and it you know I try to

uh I don't think you've had eight up freed on your show but he's had his sonry

ah Torrey Torrey read yes they have similar analyses but he has a great line that neoliberalism

is just capitalism without a working class opposition and that's to me the what neoliberalism did

is it crushed that the the most prominent adversary of capital which is an organized working class

like and if you don't have that you just have capital gone wild you just have capital that could

run rough shot over society because the the only sort of force in society that has the power to

to both the road and and we would hope someday overcome the capitalist mode of production is the

working class and and that's again you know I'm it's a broken record but my goal in the book is

literally to just go back to Marxist basics on so many different levels and one of them is this

notion of working class agency right working the working class being this special agent of transformation

in a capital society and a lot of again I agree there's the new left is not all bad but one of the

things the new left did was just abandoned that notion right and for good reason as you're saying

because what was happening though the working class was losing and getting crushed and so a lot of

people were looking for new theories new new theories of transformation and you know and basically

what I argue in the book is that because the working class was defeated hands so weak as you said

the leftist for decades now have just been sort of like on this bandwagon that basically because of

that what we're going to do is we're going to create social movements that substitute right and

that we're going to create what they always call a movement of movements you're going to have the

anti-black lives matter and the climate movement and all these different movements on these you

know feminist movement anti-war movement they're all going to kind of coalesce into this like force

that could overcome capitalism eventually but the problem is that we we've basically been saying

that I would I think Andre Gore's was one of the sort of originators of this kind of

these books literally called farewell to the working class like this idea like we can have new

agents of change and we can have these new kind of exciting student movements and it's all going

to work out well for us and I think by that you know in 2025 we can finally admit like it did not

work out well I think that the kind of apogee of or the peak of the climax of this way thinking was

really the WTO protests in 1999 which many commentators at the time were pointing out that like what's

the deal like you have all these different movements that are in the streets and it's not clear

like what their shared demands are what their shared interest are right and and and same with

occupy right so so to me like yes the working class is weak and defeated but the only antidote to

that is is is real reviving working class power and working class organization through the trading

movement and you would hope someday through political parties that actually represented working class

in a left wing way because right now as you know the working classes are shifting more and more

to the right which you would think would be like a five alarm fire emergency for socialist and

left thinkers but most people on the left today don't seem to want to think about it or talk about

right and so but you know you can debate whether or not unions and parties are still the

vehicles of working class organization that they were in like the classic days of let's say it's

second international or something like that but if not unions and parties we've got to think about

new models of organization and we need to rebuild that working class power and then if you have a

fighting organized working class you can start to make real material demands on society that would

have to be about a number of things from healthcare to child care to you know basic living conditions

for people but also it would have you know you would hope to think that climate could be folded in

to a kind of large set of programs and demands around around basically combating the austerity

of capitalism over the last several decades and doing a kind of larger public goods agenda that would

build out a lot of this public infrastructure that we need for the climate crisis like you know

something like mom Donnie which I think very cleverly he was like you know ultra-left

climate activist person in dsa and then when he became a mayoral candidate he stopped talking

about climate full stop didn't mention climate but what he did mention is fast free buses right

and we'll see you know if he can actually deliver fast free buses to millions of New Yorkers

and they actually benefit from that and they see like this improvement in their way of life through

that but also that's like you know in a marginal way that's a real climate win to kind of move people

toward public transit that's the kind of direction I think we we we have to go but it yeah it has to

be kind of like you know organizing masses millions of people like old working class parties used to

do on sort of basic bread and butter type of demands and I think you know this excitement around

sewer socialism or whatever is because those socialists back in the day they just delivered

you know back then they were delivering things like basic water infrastructure and sanitation

infrastructure when waterborne illness and cities was like an epidemic right so like that's the

kind of that's the level we need to to to work on I think you're absolutely right at the heart

of these issues with unchecked capitalism is the decline of the working class and people not

people in the writer and the riterian side will talk about oh well I'm for capitalism but unchecked

capitalism is too far well it's like what was checking capitalism it's not just the state why

was the state checking capitalism because the working class is checking the state so then get

into this problem of like cause and effect right how do you have reunionization and a working class

moving at a time when there's so much reason why the working class can't organize like for I can

think of the two biggest factors most likely due to capital mobility because it's just like

this is easier for companies to you know simply ship their jobs elsewhere but the biggest the

second biggest thing is and disposability of labor like you know mass migration and you know the

fact that's like you know workers as disposable if you try to stir up a fight you get fired and

these kind of visa programs make it so migrant workers can't really organize with native workers

in the way that they might have been able to you know at some point in history right and what I

think you know I'm curious if you agree at all is I got to think like you need a political change

to allow for the working class to be able to organize that could propel that movement forward

in the sense that so many of the can barriers to organizing are very political in the sense of

one thing I like about Rob Ashton who's running for the NDP that we mentioned

his policies he's forgetting right of the exploitive foreign occupancy work visas

which is basically how a lot a lot of mass migration is driven by this by these programs that

encourage people to come work temporarily maybe get a path to citizenship citizenship maybe not

they can't pretty much unionize whatsoever because they'll get like deported effectively

and you know not only that they're willing to take less because it's relatively higher standard

of living it is just this nightmare for organization having these sort of like labor law changes

that would one you know allow for more reunionization also getting rid of right to work laws and

all these state obstacles that could maybe pose a path because like right now we wonder like

why is unionization so low it seems it's like lower than when unions were illegal

which makes makes makes really think it's like well probably because a lot don't feel

it's possible so at that point it's like I you know do you think that it's a matter it's a dialectic

between politics where politics maybe has to come first but that within it it's charged by class

politics that political change has to happen before you know that you know what I mean because

this is a debate I see because I lean more on the social democratic democratic socialists and

a lot of like Marxists tend to think you need to kind of just have like the revolution

I'm curious where you land on this because for me I just don't really see a way out of this

until you have at least conditions where the working class is actually empowered

yeah absolutely I do see it as I guess the academic word would be iterative process where

political changes will enable organizational changes which will enable political changes and back

and forth you know so you know like in the United States like our labor law is so reactionary

market it makes it almost impossible like you you may have heard I think at this point it's almost

been four years since Chris malls and those Amazon workers won a union in the Amazon warehouse

in Staten Island and they still don't have a contract because Amazon is the most powerful company

on earth well maybe not but up there and they're just able to throw all their lawyers and to just

drag the process out and it's just impossible right so there's real there's a real sense and there

was excitement until the Democrats disappointed us once again that you know we needed something

that was called the pro act which would be this labor law that could just make it easier for workers

to organize right and that would be transformative to have legal reform like that but the the problem

is as we saw like we're we're not going to win that reform just by the grace of enlightened

Democrats right so you have to you have to actually try to leverage labor's power as it exists

through through things like strikes and and that's the big thing that really hits me in terms

of like yeah the working class has been defeated but it's also stopped using its power that it has

if you look at sort of the chart of strike activity basically around 1980 it fell off the cliff and I

think that is partially related to what you're talking about workers are scared right they've been

scared since the era of deindustrialization and and you know all these attacks on the globalization

jobs and globalization yeah and as you're saying capital mobility and I would call it like and this

is again back to a basic Marxist theory of the global reserve army of labor has been massively

expanded through sort of huge you know depeasantization and and the huge production of surplus

populations around the world which have created not only migration but have created surpluses of

of reserve armies of labor in in countries all over the world which make it harder for workers

to organize I will say that there has been a period especially in COVID where we kind of were

slapped in the face with the return of kind of tight labor markets and I think that actually did

increase kind of structural leverage and power that workers had particularly in the post-COVID era

seems like it's flee it's it's not quite as tight as it used to be so that leverage might have

already gone away I'm freaking out there they were freaking out yeah no and everyone's freaking out

they were trying to cut all the cut all the benefits in England I mean Boris Johnson deliberately

wanted to rapidly increase mass migration which is what kind of led to the concern coming back

like in a more visceral form you know under Richie Sunak then

Starmer and I reforms like when the next election and the thing about the right is where they

show their cards as they will tap into this issue but like Maloney they do it cleverly by only

blaming refugees and targeting only illegal migration but increasing legal migration so that

they can keep that reserve army of labor it's like what you're seeing with Maloney right now actually

increasing the overall amount and it's because like obviously they don't serve labor right the right

wing parties so they they wouldn't want to inadvertently strengthen labor markets which

they actually I hate to say as bad as as much as I would I absolutely oppose immigration

restrictions on racial lines that are like explicit racial lines like you know

China exclusion acts and stuff like that you know the 1920s part of what it helped big resurgence

of labor organizing was the tightening of migration compared to the high point of the industrial

revolution where migration was at a high point in the from the 20s up until the 1920s from the

1900s to the 1920s there was tighter labor markets and it allowed for unionization at a level

that was not precedent and then it all got even better after you got FDR right who legalized who

creates all these laws that allow for unions to actually you know have more power and we saw

this in many countries right so it's going to lead to what Hayek Fierne wrote to surf them

according to him he also in the book talks about he's literally empowering them too much they'll you

know they'll take the whole pie if only yeah yeah that's interesting I do think you know again

it's right there in capital if the reserve army is large then the work the employed workforce

is disempowered and and able to as easily right but what I was going to say earlier is there's also

just there's nitty-gritty organizing work that can be done that can lead to kind of a pretty

significant breakthroughs I mean I was pretty darn inspired by what happened in the united auto

workers which was started by basically what's called a reform caucus where a bunch of like

sort of activists union people what they wanted to do was to really transform the UAW and how it

was governed because it was so corrupt and like they didn't even have elections where members had a

vote and so literally their demand was when member one votes like a basic democratic demand for

elections in the union in this reform caucus basically led to a reform slate that went up for

election and they did they elected that reform slate and the leader of the slate was Sean Fein

who came out of this much sort of more class struggle sort of militant labor history and approach

that you could tell like when they won when he got sort of catapulted to leadership like the first

thing they did was organize a strike for their contract right and they took all the big three

automakers to task on this contract and they were you know there was a really strategic strike

they was called a stand-up strike which harkened back to the sit-down strikes of Flint Michigan in

the 30s and they shut down these strategic factories that kind of like their most profitable like

SUV was produced in this factory so you shut down that factory at one point the financial time said

General Motors was losing 800 had lost 800 million dollars from the strike so like that is the

muscle and power that workers can do and then and then they they won a record contract and again

this is kind of what I mean by the iterative process if the workers can organize and they can

actually deliver material gains to workers then working class people start to believe again that

like if we collectively organize we can improve our lives because I think most working class people

don't believe that they're very cynical rightfully they don't believe there's really any form of

politics that can improve their life because certainly there's no evidence that it does right so

and then after they won this record contract the UAW goes down and organizes and wins a union

election in Tennessee in the south in the right to work state which had never won they had never

won a union election in an auto plant in the south before and so they then they lost in Alabama

shortly after which was kind of depressing but you know you don't win them all

and you know and and we'll see where that goes I know the UAW is going to have elections again

next year and we'll see if Sean Fane and his his sort of approached sort of I would call it like

class struggle unionism if it will survive but like that's the kind of path forward that like you

know you have to organize and you have to fight and if you win stuff you start to build confidence

and you start to build that kind of that movement and the the labor labor notes organization

calls putting the movement back in the labor movement I think even in most unions most workers don't

really feel like the union is fighting for them or represents them and anything that white people

are apathetic so that's the kind of nitty gritty stuff that I think has to happen but you're

absolutely right that there's also just structural factors like a tightness of the labor market that

are kind of beyond our control though I agree that like we should try to legally politically

organize different policies that could make conditions more favorable for labor and for organizing

definitely yeah a big big part of your analysis is to reframe the issue none in terms of

altruism none in terms of saving the planet like it's something that we have to sacrifice for

but rather in a way that is beneficial actively it appeals to the interests of working people

how do we how do we do that how do we move towards a proletarian ecology as you call it

yeah so that's a little bit of a theory jargon for me but it really it really I'm a I'm a

Marx nerd I've been teaching capital vying one I just finished yesterday the semester of teaching

it for the sixth time and it really strikes me that you know from the get go Marx's analysis

of the proletariat or the working class under capitalism is a class that is you know in classical

terms separate from the means of production but that is the most significant means of production

that it is separated from is the land right because it's separated from any kind of independent

means of subsistence which traditionally for 99.9% of human history had been a direct connection with

the land right where people produce there we talked about this earlier where people produce the

their subsistence through the land through muscle power but proletarianization is a process of

of forcibly often violently separating the mass of people from the land and then forcing them

to sell their their labor power on the market for a wage right so what I want to just reframe

that is to just remind us that that theory of proletarianization is is very ecological right it's

about a process of of really changing the conditions of life for working people in a capitalist

system is sort of it's a world of historical change for most of history again working people work

the land and now working people have to make money right and there's this fundamental ecological

separation from the conditions of the ecological conditions of life itself and that's what I call

proletarian ecology but what proletarian ecology means is that there's this because of that because

people survive via the market there's this fundamental insecurity and survival right and of course

now since the book hits come out there's just been this explosion of inflation and cost of living

crisis affordability so it's just heightened this sense that people can't really survive under

capitalism so what I try to argue in the book is that a lot of environmentalists and environmental

thinkers and activists and strategists have always tried to be like well if we're going to get people

excited about the environment we have to kind of like come up with some sort of environmental

interest that they have like they're being poisoned by the pollution or their land is being stolen

or their water is being poisoned poisoned or or like try to convince people again the world is

ending climate crisis is here right we're all gonna die right like these kind of like environmental

interests that have to be sort of convinced um but what I tried to prepare a movie

yes the the nobody like everyone forgot about after we yeah it hit hard it wasn't even a bad movie

but it was just like it's just it's the embodiment of why that doesn't work well yeah it's about

as misty rolls you could get and client and whatever you want to say climate change is not the same

as a comet coming through the for the earth right it's just not and and you can't just

tell people like you know you know in 10 years we're gonna have famines and and expect them to

like sort of be mobilized into action but what I say for the pullitarian ecology perspective is

people's everyday material existence it like the disaster for people's not climate change or pollution

or environment it's the cat it's capitalist and it's survival trying to survive in the market

isn't every day thing and this the bad I I didn't come up with this the best articulation of this

was when the yellow vest eruption happened in France when they were revolting against the climate

policy that Macron was trying to push through a carbon tax and they said politicians care about

the end of the world and we just want to get to the end of the month right like that just that

just juncture between climate people always talking about this kind of abstract end of the world

and real real ordinary working people you know their struggle is in everyday struggle every month

struggle to just pay basic bills and to survive via the market but what I wanted to point out is

that struggle is ecological because we are we are ecological as humans we're trying to live on this

planet and the weird way in which we try to live is mediated by this weird thing called the market

and so that needs to be the the bedrock of any kind of successful

mass environmental politics is trying to reach people on that end of month

ecological level where you could actually improve their conditions of survival on a day-to-day

basis and like I said earlier you know it's not like climates disconnected from that stuff

climate is all about energy and housing and trade support and all the things that people

struggle to access actually so that's so again I really do think like mom Donnie it's a small thing

but the free public transit or free God forbid we have a housing crisis in this country so offering

people public housing that was like green and retrofitted or stuff like that like would be life

changing for people and of course the the the the core of climate is energy and so

electricity prices are going through the roof and so if we can find a way it's a decarbonized

electricity but also by cheaper electricity like that's you don't have to convince people about

the climate science to get them on board for that kind of program right so that's that's the

basis I think for a kind of mass working class type of climate politics but again many climate

activists have been doing the exact opposite by advocating for things like carbon taxes which

are actively trying to make prices higher for energy and stuff like yeah like the carbon

tax was it was terrible I mean just it affected like soccer moms and truck drivers and you know

this was kind of a period that kind of like radicalize me I mean the first moment for the climate

stuff I've told this story before but just it was I remember it so vividly was you know

you know witnessing right in front of where I was working a big climate protest in which

Greta Thurmburg was attending those in Ottawa at the time and Justin Trudeau attended this protest

and just walked through it and high-fived a bunch of people and he went and continued the same kind

of climate policy that he has and we're which involved basically allowing pipelines but also you know

carbon attack out of these carbon taxes it's a really weird kind of bait and switch and it yeah it

was pretty much like green austerity hardly hardly even that but yeah it's one in which it framed

the issue as climate something being actively hostile to people's interests so there are these

bad policies and then there's also you know the the messaging of it which is you know both need to

be fixed so that you need the policies that don't cause these reactions like which another thing

that I've seen is just these farmers protests that seem to happen yeah in like the Netherlands and

France now probably you know Canada less so but I mean there was a trucker convoy which is a separate

thing but like I mean these are actually the kind of people who I think are you know out of any

other classes other than the working class that can be in a coalition with the working class and

that I would just call it the broader labor coalition or the I like to call it the working majority

which is basically the people who make their majority of their income from work manually labor

rather than collecting rent or capital assets etc and it's like even if they might have

interest that are at odds with people they employ there's still a common common interest against

the capital owners who are profiting from you know buying and selling of assets of profiting from

a collection of rents and we cannot afford to be like radicalizing these people I mean it's at

this point you have now like labor and farmers being pushed to the right yeah what is left left

with at those point or what is a liberal side left with it's just I mean what the liberal

side's now left with leftists telling other people to vote for liberals it's what it seems to be

right now like you but this framing you know what do you think about this because I always hated

the saving the planet kind of PMC planet framing this is like human civilization like nature is

tandem with human civilization you can't separate it I know why is the left so averse to like

talk of civilization because I feel like that don't you want to create like a green more like

eco-friendly civilization there's so much obvious ways to frame this issue like

conserving the motherland you could say fatherland but that sounds a little fishy

but it's like I mean it is one of the most human things I mean people say you know that

I mean I don't know leftists will get on board with stuff like land back

for indigenous people right right it's not like land itself like talking about land and

human nature to it is inherently like right coded but that is just you know it's it's a conservative issue

going to Japan that was another thing that was big for me just seeing how learning how really

the conservatives in Japan don't can like they don't they don't

time it's not a politicized issue in the in the same way in the way that like it's take

you want to keep a big poor part of Japan like basically green and not any when you have a kind

of social norm against pollution so this I know this is all individual a little bit but still

it's framed in this very conservative way like you're conserving order you're conserving

civilization I know why it's that difficult to think of it this way because yeah it's why

it's just like trying to simplify the question because there's a lot of things thrown there but

really you know you're talking about framing the conversation in terms of class interest also how

do you you know beyond just that like how do you frame it as like something that people feel

connected to you know I don't and I don't feel like people feel connected to this issue that they

should yeah I mean there is a there's always been a kind of conservative tradition kind of like

going back to the land and and kind of rural values and that kind of stuff so that does exist

climate's different though because this is weird global issue that has to do not with the land so

it has a lot to do with the land about what we do on the land but it's more about the conditions

of the atmosphere and the sort of biogeochemical cycles of carbon through the atmosphere which I mean

like the effect yeah affected it affects the land in terms of that and also what we you know like if

you burn a forest it affects the climate right precisely and as the climate warms it

desertifies the land right so yeah now the drought and stuff exactly so yeah it's a it's a two

and three process so the way I I kind of what again once again I found like oh there's an overlap

here with just sort of traditional Marxist and socialist politics which is that that there's

there's a basis of internationalism that basically like when you emit carbon you are creating

increasing conditions that could lead to stronger monsoons and Pakistan or something like that you

know like it doesn't matter where the emissions happen it affects everyone on the planet right there's

this kind of um eventually in the book I call it species solidarity that like really we have to

kind of realize that like the stakes are all of human survival on the planet right the conditions

of human habitability as you said uh human survivability on the planet are at stake right and so

that does require us coming together as a species right and kind of confronting this because of you

know if the United States decarbonizes and we reach net zero by our target of 2050 but China

the rest don't like it and this is a right wing talking point but it's true it doesn't really matter

like the climate doesn't care that your nation decarbonized right that has to be a globally coordinated

process so I think that's also why people don't want to do it because it's framed actually in that

kind of way that everyone has to do it for it to work yeah actually I think it is that the

precisely that kind of the idea that everyone which is true to the larger extent right yeah you do

need all like you need China and America to decarbonize yeah but I think it's that framing which

creates such a it makes it seem so far removed yes so people say okay well okay no one not

everyone's gonna do it so therefore no one should do it yeah I think it should be framed in terms of

yes it will benefit your country yes right like if every country talked in that way like every

country had movements that spoke to the people in their countries about their interests because

that's that's the thing like it is it is a totally global issue it's a total if it's you know one

have one country's actions will affect others etc needs no needs of explaining at this point but I

feel like when when people talk about humanity comes as a whole it's like it doesn't really like

that's not really felt because it just seems removed you mentioned the LOS we want to get to the end

of the month it's like yeah most people aren't thinking about other countries and even if even if

they should it's like I think those narratives what what there is like a subtle way in which

climb people in the right will care about climate change but it's not connected to actual climate

change but it's connected to environmentalism like you know this RFK kind of you see in bodies

that appeal where they'll talk about the chemicals that are which in a very real way actually are

kind of you know he takes it to the certain extreme but there's a very yeah as you already know

the very real way in which chemicals absolutely do mess up the food supply the water supply and

you know micro plastics have all these now you know very negative impacts on what kind of

stuff sperm count testosterone we're still learning new stuff all the time about it but it's like

yeah when it's framed in that kind of way I think that it just I see it it affects people in a more

real way like even all the kind of eco granola moms you know this was the stuff that they seem to

care about it is like yeah whether this makes my kid healthy right whether whether my air sucks

you know we don't want to be we'll go over the living environment where the air sucks

so this this is kind of what I mean you know that's kind of the national appeal I know a lot of

Marxists are have a interesting relationship with but I just I just see it in a realist way which is

you know yeah how do you get you how do you get like this to happen right yeah I was going to say

that China they've done a lot of people are very excited about the decarbonization they're doing

but a lot of the reason they've done a lot of it is because of air pollution and that they're

really just trying to clean the air because it was really a crisis of of of significant proportions

so yeah no I totally agree that it's going to have to be these end-of-month material concerns and

and yeah I think practically speaking in the world of however many 190 nation states they

you know like channeling it into a kind of national program you know I and one of these people that

was excited by the Green New Deal and I think if you look at the original New Deal the way in which

it was like about uplifting an American economy and all these kinds of ways is not something that we

should just totally reject the thing the thing I just I do and perhaps overly nostalgic about

about that history of Marxism and and the communist movement that was though ultimately about

human emancipation on a planetary level right there's this book that's popular in kind of

TSA circles for a while called the Romance of American Communism Fibian Gornek I think her name is

and she she just did oral history with communist party organizers in Newark City mostly in the

1930s she did the oral histories maybe like in the 50s and 60s and 70s maybe even later actually

I think it was more in like the 60s and 70s but anyway it was just amazing like these party activists

like they really felt like and this is of course before they before Khrushchev's speech and

everyone found out that Stalin was very bad but in the 30s the communist party activists like

they really felt like they're part of this world historical movement to liberate humanity like

to abolish poverty on a global scale like that's how they narrowed their mission in the communist

party right and in that kind of that kind of world historical like purpose and meaning that people

found in the communist and Marxist movement I think that there might be I just could see a day

where people realized again like that that the climate crisis and ecological crisis does require

that kind of vision right that kind of vision where we do have to solve this as species right we

have to come together and and it yeah I think now in our world today it is it's way too abstract

to not going to win people over with a kind of vision of kind of species internationalism or

something like that but I think if we do rebuild these these sort of organizations of working class

power at national levels and we start to fight and build these organizations and then you know

then the dream would be that actually have like you know networks of of working class organizations

are international because we did have things called international that you know had varying

degrees of efficacy but like this idea that that you know we're bringing together this movement

on a global scale to liberate humanity that kind of vision is what actually is exactly what

the ecological crisis is all about as well right now there's two sort of different components of

that right the there's a solvability at that international level which I very much on board but

that would require like nations having political changes implementing policies and then you know

working with other countries that are in a similar page on that problem to you know at the at the

international level really solve problems it's kind of I see it so like for me internationalism

I believe in as a political like as a political goal yeah and we're just like we have solving

problems but as not it really is a style of politics I don't think it ever has really resonated

with many people at all the internationalism like as a style of politics in fact actually I think

that the the internationalism the communist world are a case in point because what's funny is

like I was thinking of the movie reds yeah you know about John Reed yeah and got American winner

of the Russian Revolution yeah they have this kind of like optimism about it all yeah and I think

it's because there wasn't what ended up happening of course with the common turn and he's like

international communist organizations is kind of like a think like a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union

and I have a hard time seeing how it wouldn't end up that way if you just had like one super power

supercharged the communist movement it's kind of where I'm very skeptical of these things because

I think about actually the internationalism the Marxism was actually one of his most disastrous

things because it was used by the Soviet Union to just control all the communist parties to totally

fuck up on some of the issues like they like in France and Italy not only that like in the

Arab world is totally disastrous because they all had a coastline on Israel so you had socialism

became like seen as a satanic people and then you had then you had this other problem which is

like I mean just the gay bad advice the parties a lot of the time like the Chinese right well the

irony is that I don't really even trust it because I think a lot of the tense people only people

in countries or localities regions know how to solve the problems in those places right like because

they actually know it sure so it's like you know at the level of policy I think it's it has to

be rooted in the places but internationally is where you you deal with you know stuff that is

inherently international it transcends border right but that's like a policy thing like yeah

well ironically like let's do it to facilitate trade deals yeah they they're going to

as international and yeah no but the irony is the the book the communist party in the US was most

powerful in the 1930s right and that's when the labor movement was most powerful as we talked about

but ironically when they were having all these high and mighty ideas about liberating humanity

and global communism was like at the the the darkest hour of the purges and and the kind of

horrors of of the Soviet of Stalinism right so but of course they weren't really aware of the extent

of that at the time um you know it comes across in the book probably but I was also swept up when I

was writing the book and kind of like I guess some people called it like this neo-katsky and movement

and sort of looking back to the second international as this model of a perhaps more democratic

internationalism because I I do agree with you the third international leaves a bit to be desired

and it's not really an international at all it's kind of a Soviet dictated internationalism

um but but I wouldn't want that model of internationalism to lock us into what could be possible

I want to talk about two things that are real all around energy so what is the role of nitrogen

in this energy regime that exists that encourages super high emissions and also you wouldn't

talk about that you can maybe get to the part about powering the grid which I thought was very

interesting as well the strategy about powering the grid and no unionizing workers in in these

industries yeah it's already unionizing workers so before I had my child and start thinking about

more about planet politics I was doing a research project on what I call the political

ecology of industrial nitrogen right where I was trying to study this very very very dirty

industrial sector from a kind of political perspective to try to understand how the the actors

within it kind of justified the incredible impacts it was having and one thing I just from learning

about how nitrogen fertilizers produced a long story but it generally it has to take nitrogen from

the atmosphere for free and combine it with a source of hydrogen and it turns out the cheapest way

to get this hydrogen is extricating it from hydrocarbons which are generally fossil fuels in the

United States that means natural gas in China it means coal and this process of taking the hydrogen

from the the carbon creates a byproduct of carbon dioxide which is as you know the main greenhouse

gas and the in the book again I'm really trying to focus on production and focus on who owns and

controls production and what I learned from studying the sector is the people who own and control

the nitrogen capital as I call it they they couldn't care less about carbon footprint of their actions

they they could substitute you know you can get hydrogen from water it's called electrolysis

and you could do it without creating carbon emissions but it's way more expensive and so to make

more profit and to make more money they obviously are going to go with the fossil fuels and they're

very hostile to any kind of what they call carbon constraints that's how they they discuss climate

regulation and that like we were talking about earlier they say like well if we're if we have

carbon constraints but China doesn't then they're going to beat us in the global market

preferitilizer so we're screwed right and at that when I was researching they were saying this

and I was teaching volume one to my students and literally the same the capitalist we're saying

the same thing about child labor laws in the in the 1800s so like if we have to abide by child

labor laws then they won't do the child labor laws in France and then they're going to beat us

out in the global markets we're going to be screwed so it really like hit home that there's this

sort of logic of capital and profitability that overrides everything else and there's just no

no room to even care about the climate when you're in the capitalist industrial sector right and so

again really trying to point out that that's kind of what we're up against this kind of really

relentless focus on capital accumulation in in industrial sectors and you know so much of the

discussion is this sort of more moralistic behavioral question about what you do in your consumption

life and it doesn't matter to these people that organize production and and I kind of analyze

nitrogen through a carbon lens but what's interesting is that nitrogen the nitrogen industry is more

known for being an environmental disaster because of the water pollution from applying nitrogen

fertilizer on farms and then the nitrogen runs off into water systems and creates huge amounts of

which called eutrification where the kind of it sucks all the oxygen out of water systems and

creates toxic blooms in these algae blooms in these water systems so and all this is understood

by the industry and it's like sort of locked into their profit orientation and do anything about

in terms of the grade and electricity that's another kind of as I started to sort of research what

what we need to do to solve climate change it became very clear that actually

it is super complicated and it's a lot of different things going on but the main strategy is actually

quite simple and it's like people call it the electrify everything it's a strategy where you

basically have to clean up electricity and yes I would advocate a fair amount of nuclear power to

do that which is an electric power technology but also we can use solar and wind and hydroelectricity

and geothermal there's a lot of different low and zero carbon options we have and we need to take

the electric sector that's currently using natural gas and coal and shift it to these low and zero

carbon but then the next step is once you clean up the electric sector and make it zero carbon

is you have to start to electrify things that we currently don't use electricity for which

classically are vehicles but also our home heating systems can be replaced by electric heat pumps

and but there's also a heck of a lot more in like industry that could be electrified

and and and various other things that currently run on fuel that could run on I mean from

everything from a leaf blower a lawn mower it can be electrified right so

speaking of green industrialization like that project some people say it will require two or

three times expansion of the electricity grid right and this is again I was writing this before

all this insanity around AI and data centers it's just exploded and now people are saying we're

going to have to like quadruple the grid in the next 20 years to accommodate not only green

electrification for climate change but data centers and AI right so this is like going to be this

enormous infrastructure project to as the industry people say 2x3x the grid or whatever

and so then again it just struck me that oh that oh so it's really centered on the electric sector

but the workers in the electricity sector are in the US at least and I think most of the world are

disproportionately unionized right and they are again highly skilled and have the leverage that

skilled work comes with and so it just struck me as like a lot of people and I was connected with

a lot of dsa people at the time and people were talking about this kind of rank and file union

strategy where you get jobs and strategic union sectors to kind of build a more militant

labor movement in those sectors and by the way that was again what happened in the UAW it was

this kind of rank and file strategy that actually bore fruit let trust me it does not always bear fruit

like you get these radicals they start or form caucus in the union and it just goes nowhere that

can easily happen but so people in the dsa were getting jobs as teachers you know at the time

there are a lot of teacher strikes and and they were getting jobs as nurses and there was a lot

of militancy and healthcare and education and so I just thought well if you're concerned about

climate the electric sector is right there and so I'm not sure it's really necessarily climate

related but there but since I wrote the book and I don't think it has anything to do with my book

but there has been a reform caucus that's been formed in the what's the main electricity union

in the US is called the international brotherhood of electrical workers they're called what are they

called crew the congress of rank and file electricians I think it is something like that and so they're

trying to form this kind of militant caucus and the IBW and so we'll see where that goes but in the

event like again like we make climate change pretty complicated but actually if we could just clean

up the electric sector we would get like I don't know like 60 70% of the way there where we need to go

so it's a huge it's a huge challenge and it's all centered on kind of one part of the economy

and the more you learn about electricity the more you learn it's just it's it's just crazy

complicated and the governance of it and the markets that run around that are just insane

and we've deregulated it in a lot of ways so like there's so much volatility and kind of chaos

happening in that sector right now so I actually think it's kind of right for

I am not part of like the revolutionary Marxist tradition but like I think the electric sector

is kind of right for kind of revolutionary change and and it's sort of basic makeup because it's

just sort of headed for sort of reckoning I would say so

I'm very interested in that because I'm very interested in you know Marx's insight was

the work class were the agent of change because they had the power and the interest not just the

interest the power exactly and that was based on a time right and I think that's still true

but I don't think they're the only block and so we should always be looking at what is the power

block that has the interest in power that's something I'm always constantly on the lookout for

I know Varu Fakis has been very interested in how do you get parts of the tech workers

to you know side with a socialist project which I think is interesting because that's pretty

that's pretty important right but those are all complex discussions we're going to move to

the back room now to discuss degrowth which is whenever we talk environment you have to talk about

degrowth at least once and you know other stuff related to related climate change but it's

continuing debate and if you're not part of the back room already you should become part of it

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I am sick and tired of revolutionaries or protest movements which focus on those ecstatic moments

oh my god one million people on syntagma square on tachrier in Istanbul and so on we were also

enthusiastic there and so on and so on I'm not impressed by that at all I think this is even

relatively easy to do the true test of a revolution or radical social change is how do ordinary people

experience the change when the ecstatic moment is over when things return to normal that's the

most difficult task when nothing happens when just everyday life is here how is this everyday life

different from the previous everyday life