In this episode, we sit with Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal (2021), to discuss a range of issues pertaining to climate justice. We discuss the GND’s (lack of) engagement with anti/imperialism, class struggle over the socialization of the means of production and why it’s necessary in a just transition, the political economy of land, structural adjustment programs, national sovereignty, Palestine, and how all of these things connect.
Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to a number of journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society.
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Concepts to look into that Max refers to:
- “Imperial core” & “World-System” are terms adopted from the World-Systems Theory. It is a framework for conceptualizing the global dimensions of the capitalist mode of production in such a way that sees spaces of concentrated capital accumulation, industrial development, and advanced militarism as the “imperial core” and spaces where land and labor are exploited in service of the former as the “periphery.” Of course, the theory is much more complex than that and deserves further reading. The wikipedia page does a decent job at explaining it and you can access it here.
- “Primitive accumulation” is a Marxian term that refers to the accumulation that happens prior to capital accumulation. In short, capital accumulation refers to the surplus value extracted by the owners of the means of production (capitalists) from the worker (by worker we mean the working class as traditionally understood but also from nature). Primitive accumulation is what precedes this moment, and in Marx’s usage of the term it was referring to the Enclosures in England, whereby peasants were displaced from their lands, yanked from their sources of food and labor, in service of privatizing large tracts of land and insert them into a market system in the making. Today, there are contemporary adoptions of this term to conceptualize the necessary dispossession enabling profit-making. An example of this is David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession.”
- If you’re unfamiliar with “feudalism” or the feudalist mode of production, visit this page.
- “Structural Adjustment Programs” are loans issued by the IMF and World Bank to countries in crisis under the pretense of stimulating "economic growth and development" but are fundamentally imperialist tools used to open up postcolonial geographies to Western capital. The loans are conditional upon the recipient country's adoption of "structural adjustment" which refers to a policy paradigm in which the state privatizes some assets and sectors, cuts back on social spending, and overall creates conditions that are favorable to capital accumulation with a degraded social safety net. Read this short article for more context.
