It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food.
In the annals of agrarian history, one particular movement has left a profound impact on the collective imagination of food sovereignty advocates. The Diggers in 17th century England were led by the visionary Gerrard Winstanley. This radical group emerged during a period of intense social and political upheaval, offering a revolutionary perspective on land ownership and food production that continues to resonate with modern struggles for (food) justice.
The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, arose in 1649, a time when England was reeling from the aftermath of civil war. Winstanley and his followers dared to imagine a different world. The group challenged the very foundations of the emerging capitalist system and the enclosure movement that was rapidly privatising previously common lands. But Winstanley’s vision was not merely theoretical.
On 1 April 1649, the Diggers began their most famous action, occupying St. George’s Hill in Surrey, where they established a commune, cultivating the land collectively and distributing food freely to all who needed it. This act of direct action was a powerful demonstration of their philosophy in practice.
As Winstanley declared:
“The earth was made to be a common treasury for all, not a private treasury for some.”
The Diggers, true to their name, began their movement by literally digging up unused common lands and planting crops. According to Professor Justin Champion, they planted “peas and carrots and pulses” and let their cows graze on the fields.
While the Diggers saw their actions as relatively harmless (Champion compares it to having an allotment), local property owners viewed it as a serious threat, likening it to “village terrorism”, according to Champion.
The local landowners called in troops to suppress these actions. Despite their relatively small numbers and short-lived experiments, which spread across parts of England, Champion suggests that the Diggers posed a significant ideological threat to the existing social order, challenging notions of private property and social hierarchy.
“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft”.
He added:
The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.
The backlash from local landlords was systematic. The Diggers faced beatings and arson, forcing them to move from St George’s Hill to a second site in Cobham, until they were finally driven off the land entirely.
Writing in 1972 in his book The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill, a prominent historian of the English Civil War period, suggested that the Diggers’ influence was more widespread than just their most famous colony at St. George’s Hill. He argued that from Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire to Gloucestershire and Kent, Digger influence spread all over southern and central England.
While the actual number of people involved in Digger experiments was relatively small (estimated at 100-200 people across England) and ended in 1651, their ideas spread more widely through pamphlets and word of mouth.
This widespread influence, as described by Hill, suggests that the Diggers’ ideas resonated with people across a significant portion of England, even if actual Digger colonies were few in number.
The Diggers were a radical, biblically inspired movement that practically implemented their beliefs about common ownership of land, provoking strong opposition from the established landowners despite their generally peaceful methods.
The St. George’s Hill experiment represented a radical alternative to the prevailing economic and social order. It was an early example of what we might today call a food sovereignty project, emphasising local control over food production and distribution.
In today’s era of industrial agriculture and corporate food systems, the Diggers’ ideas remain highly significant. Their resistance to the enclosure of common lands in the 17th century mirrors today’s struggles against corporate land grabs — and the colonising actions that underpin the likes of Bayer’s corporate jargon about the unlocking of ‘business growth’, ‘driving change management’, ‘driving market share’ and ‘creating business value’ — as well as the privatisation of seeds and genetic resources.
The consolidation of the global agri-food chain in the hands of a few powerful corporations represents a modern form of enclosure, concentrating control over food production and distribution in ways that would have been all too familiar to Winstanley and his followers.
The Diggers’ emphasis on local, community-controlled food production offers a stark alternative to the industrial agriculture model promoted by agribusiness giants and their allies in institutions like the World Bank and the WTO. Where the dominant paradigm prioritises large-scale monocultures, global supply chains and market-driven food security, the Diggers’ vision aligns more closely with concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology.
Food sovereignty, a concept developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, shares much with the Diggers’ philosophy. Both emphasise the right of communities to define their own food and agriculture systems.
The Diggers’ legacy can be seen in various contemporary movements challenging the corporate food regime. From La Via Campesina’s global struggle for peasant rights to local community garden initiatives and the work of the Agrarian Trust in the US (which provides good insight into the Diggers and their continued relevance in The Diggers Today: Enclosure, Manure and Resistance), we see echoes of the Diggers’ vision.
Modern projects to create community-owned farms, seed banks and food cooperatives can be seen as spiritual descendants of the Diggers’ movement, aiming to reclaim food production from corporate control and put it back in the hands of communities.
However, realising the Diggers’ vision in the current context faces significant obstacles.
The influence of agribusiness conglomerates over key institutions and policymaking bodies presents a formidable challenge. From the World Bank to national agriculture ministries, corporate interests often shape policies that prioritise industrial agriculture and global markets over local food systems. International trade agreements and memoranda of understanding, often negotiated with minimal public scrutiny, frequently benefit large agribusiness at the expense of small farmers and local food sovereignty.
Moreover, proponents of industrial agriculture often argue that it is the only way to feed the world. This narrative, however, ignores the environmental and social costs of this model, as well as the proven productivity of small-scale, agroecological farming methods.
The Diggers didn’t just theorise about an alternative society; they attempted to build it by taking direct action, occupying land and implementing their vision of communal agriculture.
The Diggers also understood that changing the food system required challenging broader power structures. Today’s food sovereignty movements similarly recognise the need for systemic change, addressing issues of land rights, trade policies and economic justice alongside agricultural practices.
In this era of corporate-dominated agriculture, the Diggers’ vision of a “common treasury for all” remains as radical and necessary as ever.
By reclaiming the commons, promoting agroecological practices and building food sovereignty, ordinary people can work towards a world where food is truly a common treasury for all.
The Diggers recognised that true freedom and equality could not be achieved without addressing the fundamental question of who controls the land and the means of production. This understanding is crucial in the current context, where corporate control over the food system extends from land, seeds and inputs to distribution and retail.
This vision also challenges us to rethink our relationship with the land and with each other. In a world increasingly dominated by individualism and market relations, the emphasis on communal ownership and collective labour offers a radical alternative.
The Diggers’ legacy challenges us to think beyond the confines of the prevailing food regime, to envision and create a world where food and land are not commodities to be bought and sold but common resources to be shared and stewarded for the benefit of all.
Their vision of a world where “the earth becomes a common treasury again” is not a quaint historical curiosity, but a vital and necessary alternative to the destructive practices of those who dominate the current food system.
Colin Todhunter is an independent writer. Power Play: The Future of Food is the third book in a series of open-access ebooks on the global food system by the author (Global Research, 2024). Read it on Global Research (or here). Read other articles by Colin.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
UK
The Levellers, Labour and defending democracy under threat – by Beth Winter MP
“The period saw an explosion of political discussion in inns and taverns of the growing towns. The rise of the printing press and production of political pamphlets – some of which survive – tell us much of the development of Leveller ideas through argument and discussion.”
The following article is based on a speech Beth Winter gave to the Levellers Day event at Burford on Saturday 18th May at a panel discussion on Democracy Under Threat, with Gawain Little of the GFTU and John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution.
The theme of today’s discussion – of democracy being under threat – is as true today, as it was when the Levellers organised in the 1640s.
Just then, as now, there was a titanic struggle between two major factions, to rule the country – the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. We too today have a struggle between two great established parties of state, to rule the country – the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.
We know that that only reflects one dynamic. It is to a great extent about who holds executive power. Who occupies the offices of state. The Conservatives defeat we would welcome. Labour’s victory would be a step forward.
But we recognise too, that in either result, there are factors that limit how it affects the wider population.
Labour defeating the Conservatives does not guarantee there will be a change in the balance of class forces. It does not necessarily mean a transformative redistribution of power and wealth.
In the 1640s, the victory of the Parliamentarians over the Royalists demonstrated the forward march of society. The continued shift from a rural country governed by feudal power to the earliest beginnings of an increasingly urbanised country with developing industry.
This change that began gathered its own momentum as the early urbanised population and the beginnings of a socialised working class, in London and the other growing towns such as Norwich, Cambridge, Bristol and Newcastle, shared their ideas for progress and wanted to go further than their leaders wanted them to.
That discussion and debate was reflected within the Parliamentarian cause as it is in the Labour Party and increasingly outside that party in the wider labour and progressive movements today.
Democracy was under attack by Charles I. Today, democracy is under attack by the Conservatives.
Parliament sought to shackle Charles’ powers. But sought to do so in agreement with him. Today, Labour will challenge Conservative powers. But how much will it transform them?
In the 1640s, the Levellers, and also the True Levellers –known as the Diggers – organised amongst the rank and file of Parliament’s New Model Army.
Those like John Lilburne and Thomas Rainsborough, wished to change society a great deal more than Oliver Cromwell, or Henry Ireton did. They wanted the revolution that the civil war reflected to go further than the so-called ‘Grandees’ of the New Model Army.
The period saw an explosion of political discussion in inns and taverns of the growing towns. The rise of the printing press and production of political pamphlets – some of which survive – tell us much of the development of Leveller ideas through argument and discussion.
The pamphlet, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly stated’, which formed the basis of a later series of manifestos entitled, ‘An Agreement of the People’, was advocated by the Levellers at the Putney Debates, whilst Ireton advocated a more moderate ‘Heads of Proposals’ that sought accommodation with the king.
Some of those demands in key Leveller texts set out the basic tenets of a modern democratic process.
Extending suffrage and the right to stand for election to all ‘freeborn’ men, was set out as, “all men of the age of one and twenty veers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served in the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices; and be capable of being elected to that Supreme Trust”.
An end to political corruption and excessive high pay, described as, “to the end all publick Officers may be certainly accountable, and no Factions made to maintain corrupt Interests”.
Using taxation for the public good, “the raining of moneys, and generally to all things as shall be evidently conducing to those ends, or to the enlargement of our freedom, redress of grievances, and prosperity of the Common-wealth”.
And since the scale of military mobilisation of the English Civil War meant that an estimated one in seven men were recruited into the armed forces – they became the first mass great mass of public servants – and much of the Leveller agitation – as we see with public servants today – was around wages. In the 1640s, the New Model Army was left unpaid for several months, leading to agitation that became a political concern to Parliament.
In the pamphlet, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Stated’, the Levellers argued, “the Soldier hath had no pay constantly provided, nor any security for Arreers given them, & that hitherto they could not obtain so much, as to be paid up equally with those that did desert the Army, … It was declared, that it should be insisted upon resolvedly, to be done before the Thursday night after the sending the Remonstrance, and its now many moneths since.”
And these demands to improve pay and living conditions continue today. And as the movement organises today to advance its cause, so does the establishment create new measures to hold us in check.
The reverses for the progressive movement and the challenges facing us – as did the Levellers – are clear.
The corruption of ministers is a source of discussion today – just look at the Covid-19 fast-track contracts , or look at the ‘revolving door’ of leaving a ministry and securing a job in the city or on the board of a FTSE-100 company.
The use of taxation for good, as we continue to debate how public money is spent, and how much is available to government, and how much is levied on the super-wealthy, rather those on low incomes – is alive today.
And on the withholding of pay – as with the New Model Army – the public servants of the day – we have seen railway workers, teachers, nurses and doctors, civil servants and postal workers have their pay cut over many years of Conservative Government.
And the opportunity to express our opposition, just as Leveller pamphlets were suppressed and the protests at Putney, or at Burford, are today clamped down on through the Elections Act, the Strikes Act and the Public Order Act.
So whilst we can oversimplify the comparisons – and we should be thankful Britain is not in civil war – there are parallels today between the struggles of the past and the campaigns we will wage in the future.
We want to throw out this Conservative Government. But we will not be satisfied without real change in Westminster and Whitehall.
We campaign for real change, for transformative change, for the extension power and wealth to our own class, as did the Levellers so that we can decide our own futures and not wait for those on high to decide it for us.
And so in concluding, and with democracy under threat, it is worth recalling perhaps the most famous quote of the Levellers – that put by Thomas Rainsborough during the Putney Debates:
‘I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore truly, sir, I think it is clear to every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.’
Beth Winter is the MP for Cynon Valley and a regular contributor to Labour Outlook, you can follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
The article is based on a speech Beth Winter gave to the Levellers Day event at Burford on Saturday 18th May at a panel discussion on Democracy Under Threat, with Gawain Little of the GFTU and John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Capitalocene: How Capitalism Created the Climate Crisis
The current climate crisis emerged out of a specific set of historical and economic factors which have maintained capitalist accumulation and class inequalities to this day. Jason W. Moore, geographer and Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, explains how the development of capitalism fueled European colonialism and Western imperialism, resulting in a novel form of climate destruction.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by historian and geographer Jason W. Moore to speak about capitalism’s effect on climate change. If you’d like to support us, and if you’re in a position to donate, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you get onto our mailing list and like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch the show, be it on YouTube or on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Jason W. Moore.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and the author of several books, including Anthropocene Or Capitalocene? and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you. Jason Moore
What a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me. Talia Baroncelli
I came across your work because a friend of mine gave me this amazing book of yours, which you co-wrote with Raj Patel. I also was going into some of your more academic articles, and your big critique, which I thought was really pertinent, is how you critique this scientific narrative around climate change. Even in the mainstream scientific discourse, when they’re talking about climate change, such as in the IPCC reports, they’ll say that climate change is manmade and that humans are the main culprit to blame for the climate destruction that we’re witnessing.
What you’re saying is something very different, and pinpointing it on just manmade climate change or saying that the conditions we’re living in are simply due to manmade actions is a form of denialism. You’re arguing to go beyond those very binary terms of man and nature. What you’re arguing for is actually an analysis of capitalism and how capitalist systems, structures, and power dynamics are resulting in the climate change that we’re witnessing.
Why don’t you explain what you mean by this form of capitalism and the Capitalocene, and why it’s so important to go beyond our mainstream understanding of manmade climate change? Jason Moore
It’s a fantastic question. Let’s first recognize that we are subject to one of the greatest ideological con jobs in human history, which is to sort out history in terms of what I call, sarcastically, the eternal conflict between man and nature.
We want it to be clear that humanity is not a historical actor. Humans do not build empires. Humans do not build corporations. This is not the work of an abstract man or of man in general. These are the actions of specific groups of human beings who are in corporations, financial systems, and empires. These are the agents that make history. Political parties make history. Churches make history. Humanity does not make history. Humanity does not go about organizing the climate crisis. There’s a confusion indeed that is deliberately cultivated by the bourgeoisie and their ideologues, which is an argument about human nature. Humans did it.
Well, we know who is responsible for the climate crisis, and they have names and addresses, just like those corporate and capitalist actors who are responsible for the slave trade, they have names and addresses. And just like in the era of slavery, they should be expropriated. It’s as simple as that.
The solution to the climate crisis is part of this argument about the Capitalocene, that we live not in the age of man, the Anthropocene, but in the age of capital, the Capitalocene. The argument is that the source of the problem has definite historical origins in specific times and places, especially in the centuries after Columbus, long before the steam engine came along by the way. It creates a particular set of geo, cultural, economic, and political relations that are always with and within the web of life.
Capitalism did not start transforming the climate with the steam engine. Capitalism and the imperialist agencies responsible for the conquest of the Americas started the climate crisis, and it was evident as early as the long, cold 17th century, roughly from the middle of the 1500s to the year 1700. Why?
In the limitless thirst for cheap labor, the imperialist forces decimated new world populations. The forest grew back. The soils were left undisturbed. There was a drawdown of carbon dioxide which contributed to the greatest crisis that capitalism, to that point, had faced. It was planetary. It wasn’t limited to Europe. This was the era in which capitalism as a world ecology, not as an economic system narrowly conceived, but as a world ecology of power, profit, and life, come together in those centuries during this first great climate crisis, this capitalogenic climate crisis, at least in part. We see the crystallization of capitalism as a trinity, what I call the climate class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy. This was a response to the crises, the climate class conjuncture of that era, and it is still very much with us today.
We have to, first and foremost, name the system. Otherwise, we are denying climate change in the more real historical sense of who is responsible. We’re saying with the CEO of ExxonMobil, yes, climate change is real, and we all need to join together to solve the problem. Talia Baroncelli
Well, you’re trying to infuse a historical perspective into this analysis of climate change. What would you say to people who argue that there were instances of different societies having an impact on the climate, even, say, in the 1200s, for example? In the medieval period, when there was actually, I wouldn’t say, global warming, but there was a bit of a warm period, and there was some affluence that came along with that, as well as increases in the population. Because of the feudal system, more people were put to work in the feudal system under the lords. But then, when there was a cooling. As a result, there was a more vulnerable population that was more vulnerable to health crises.
A lot of people ended up dying when the Black Plague came along. In 1347, because there were still trade networks between Europe and Asia, once the Black Plague hit Europe, a lot of people, a lot of workers or peasants ended up dying. Then, we see the peasant uprisings of the late 1300s and the 1400s that led to the undermining of the feudal system.
How would you say that particular moment is different from what we’re experiencing now? Is it a different critical juncture? Why would those impacts on the environment be different from the way you’re characterizing the Capitalocene in the modern day? Jason Moore
Well, it’s another fantastic question. I’ve written quite a bit about this over the past 25 years, and people can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com, and look into these discussions. Yes, indeed, the crisis of feudalism was a climate class conjuncture, a socio-physical conjuncture, if you will. It was not the climate shift from the medieval climate anomaly, sometimes called the medieval warm period, because in Europe it was warm; that provided very favorable conditions for the emergence of feudalism and the assertion of feudal power, the encagement of the peasantry, as Christopher Wickham summarizes it. This was fundamental to the golden age of feudalism. You think of knights, the castles, and the cathedrals. When the climate shifted, it transformed everything in that civilization’s DNA. The same thing is going on today.
Here’s the most important takeaway from that story. First of all, it’s not a Malthusian story. It’s not too many people on the land, leading to famine and disease and all this. That is a straight-up ideological falsification. It was very much a Marxist struggle and contradiction of the climatological and other biological and ecological conditions of feudal power that was coming unraveled at the moment of this shift from a warm era that had endured either two and a half, three centuries, or possibly even longer, depending on how we want to look at it, to a very unfavorable climatic situation.
I like to say climate change is not everything. But if we want to understand anything about our political conjuncture today, we have to understand the climate crisis. The same is true for these previous moments, even though they weren’t nearly so dramatic. There were climate shifts within the climate stability of the Holocene. That long era from 11,700 years ago to the present is now over or close to being over.
The key takeaway is that these unfavorable shifts in the climate, unfavorable to large-scale class-dominated agriculture, were bad for the ruling classes. This is true for the feudal ruling classes in the 14th century. It was true for the ruling classes of Western Rome a thousand years earlier when we saw the onset of what science has called the Dark Ages Cold Period. It was true for what’s called the Bronze Age collapse, where a period of sustained drought, along with other factors, led to the near-simultaneous collapse of most of the major Bronze Age civilizations right around the year 1200 BCE. There’s a long history to this.
Lo and behold, the same pattern repeats itself in the history of capitalism. People don’t pay any attention to this, and as a consequence, they overstate the resilience of the ruling classes. The ruling classes today are not in a good position, and climate history tells us a lot about why that is.
As I mentioned in the previous question, the long, cold 17th century was one of the coldest periods of the past 8,000 years. This was an era of profound revolt. It’s an era that ends with civil wars and revolutions.
Oliver Cromwell in England has cut off the head of the king and is then facing the prospect of a Communist, or as they said at the time, a Communist army, the Levellers, outside of London. He was trying to figure out what to do with this. We can’t have a Communist revolution. This dynamic repeats itself again and again in the era of the French Revolution and Malthus. This was the last great cold stretch of the Little Ice Age between 1783 and 1820. This was the era of the Haitian Revolution, of the revolt in Ireland in 1798, of the English fleet mutiny in the 1790s. This was an era of profound revolution and revolt. So again, in an era of very unfavorable climate. This should give us pause to reject both the climate doomism and, I think, the climate resignation, this sense of powerlessness in the present conjuncture. These moments of unfavorable climate change are wrapped up with periods of popular revolt and the unraveling of the underlying conditions for ruling class power especially, but not only in agriculture.
The ideological terrain has been dominated by neo-Malthusians. We don’t understand that, ultimately, the source of bourgeois legitimacy is their ability to maintain a cheap food regime so people can gain access to cheap food. That’s obviously an issue in the present moment. There are many intervening factors, but it has to be front and center in our imagination that climate is, amongst others, a weak link in the imperialist chain of power. Talia Baroncelli
We’ll definitely get into how your analysis of capitalism, the Capitalocene, and world ecology can potentially be useful to revolutionary struggles as well as to the climate movement. You did bring up the issue of cheapening nature. This is something that you discuss, along with Raj Patel in your book, on that topic.
I think it was really interesting how you brought up the historical example of the island of Madeira. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was in the mid-1400s when the Portuguese went to Madeira. They were so taken by the idea of making sugar or producing sugar that they went to the island. They cleared the island of all the forestry that was there because, for every pound of sugar, they would need to burn something like 50 pounds of wood to distill the sugar and get to it. Distill the sugarcane, rather.
You use this example of what took place on the island to illustrate the seven ways in which nature is cheapened. You speak about how capitalism cheapens nature. It takes things that are essentially undenominable, or it transforms them into relations of production and consumption in ways that perhaps didn’t exist previous to that. It’s not just making the cost of things cheaper but also reducing the integrity or the value. It is also reducing people or Indigenous people to being cheap, essentially, or women and other marginalized groups, for example, and how that relates to nature and cheap goods and energy. Maybe we could get into that historical example as well, the example of Madeira and how cheapening nature and these seven cheap things that you mentioned with Raj Patel are so important to understand the perspective you’re getting at in world ecology. Jason Moore
Absolutely. When we think about the rise of capitalism and the extension of the formal colonial empire, which is modern imperialism, today, people talk about colonialism and don’t have any sense of what that is.
Colonialism, as a formal expression of imperialism, is how the bourgeoisie prefers to wage the class struggle. That is at the core of my theory of cheap nature. This expansion was because, under the conditions of the feudal crisis, the seigneurs and the aristocrats were defeated. They lost the class struggle. You mentioned the popular revolt. The peasants and workers everywhere across Europe prevented the restoration of feudalism.
To make a very long and complex story very short, they essentially forced the bankers, the kings and queens, and the seigneurs to find a solution overseas, where the overwhelming military power of the new capitalist states gave them a decisive advantage. Be mindful, they didn’t go to Africa, they didn’t go to India, they didn’t go to China because they would have lost. They went to the Americas where decisive military power allowed them to create the conditions for a good business environment.
Cheap nature has two moments, and you nailed it. It is both cheap in price for the capitalist. It’s not the $3 hamburger. It is the $10 barrel of oil. It is commodity prices. It is the cost of doing business for capital. Cheap nature is a strategy to create other cheapened moments.
Now, the second moment of cheap nature is geo-cultural devaluation. This gives rise to specific forms of proletarianization that are today talked about in very abstract and incorrect language, like women and Indigenous peoples, as if the whole point was not to create indigeneity, to create man/woman as a binary, to create racial categories in order to cheapen the labor. These are cultural expressions of the worldwide class struggle.
Why was it that capitalism needed to invent, for instance, a new binarized gender division of labor? Because it needed cheap workers. The only people who can produce cheap workers are females. So that was fundamental to the emergence, the invention of climate patriarchy, of climate apartheid, out of the raw material of what I think is the most dangerous word in the language, nature.
The book is titled Seven Cheap Things. But in fact, very quickly, we say, look, there aren’t really seven cheap things because nature is a specific cultural and political mechanism to make other relations into things and make them cheap. Cheap nature puts these two moments together. Everybody pays lip service today around intersectionality, but they never bother to put them together historically. That is the exploitation of labor power and the domination through nature, the domination of the web of life, and various forms of naturalized domination like racism and sexism. These are all intimately tied in this account. This allows us to begin to understand what is at the core of the climate crisis. And what is at the core of the climate crisis is not European white men doing bad things to landscapes. It is about the drive to find cheap labor, because without cheap labor, you can’t do anything to the rest of the web of life. You can’t turn the rest of life into a cash machine without cheap labor. And that’s more than just wage workers. It is, as I’ve been arguing, my comrades, and the World Ecology Conversation, have been arguing for over a decade. Capitalism is a system of unpaid work. It thrives when there are small pockets of market exchange of the cash nexus within oceans of cheap or potentially cheap nature, at the center of which is labor. We’re always looking at how labor is cheapened through these ideological dynamics.
I would close with a nice sound bite that I take from the great German Marxist feminist Claudia von Werlhof. She says, “Nature is everything the bourgeoisie does not want to pay for.” If you stop and think about it, that applies to racism and it applies to sexism. It applies to the whole dynamic of what economists, in a rather banal way, talk about as externalization.
We have to begin to pierce the ideological con job of this eternal conflict between man versus nature and begin to understand this is a dynamic of class struggle in the web of life. That’s an old-fashioned way of putting a very, very concrete reality here. This is not a struggle of Europe against indigenous peoples. This is the emergence of a capitalist class structure committed to an absurdity, the endless accumulation of capital, and therefore, the endless conquest of the earth, as in the story of Madeira, where one frontier gives right away to another, to another, to another, where the frontiers fix the problems of capitalism or fix the problems of the Iberian states in the era of feudal crisis. Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just touching on the unpaid aspect of labor. Silvia Federici would also speak about the importance of reproductive labor and how that form of unpaid labor is so crucial to upholding very specific capitalist relations.
Going back to the Madeira example, what happened on the island was that the island was completely deforested, and they had to shift the sugarcane production to, I believe it was wine or something else. It seems like once that happened, the people who owned the modes of production then required other frontiers to expand their relations and to continue to profit off of those other sites of power that you could potentially call them. They needed to go to what they termed the New World, to the Americas, to look for more land there and to have a cheaper labor force that they brought from Africa to then exploit and appropriate energy. Jason Moore
There’s an ongoing frontier, a restless frontier that is at the core of capitalism. There’s no capitalism without frontiers. We know this today because capitalism is in its zombie phase. It is dead. Its underlying inner sources of animism and vitality are gone. Those are frontiers. Frontiers of what? Of cheap labor, food, energy, raw materials, anything that’s fundamental to capital accumulation. The role of imperialism is to secure cheap nature frontiers. Today, those frontiers are gone. What’s the role of imperialism? Well, we’re seeing it right before our eyes. Talia Baroncelli
Would you say that your argument is similar to what David Harvey would be speaking about, the spatial-temporal fix in which, due to crises of over-accumulation, capital always seeks other areas beyond other frontiers, for example, to continue to accumulate? Then, once there’s nothing else, no other frontiers, you see these crises boiling over even within what we would consider the Global North, for example, not just in places such as the Global South. Jason Moore
Yes and no. David Harvey is a comrade and a teacher of mine. I’m very much in that intellectual lineage rather directly. Harvey is brilliant. What you just summarized is not Harvey’s position. Harvey has stated many times that capitalism does not need frontiers of cheap labor, energy, food, and raw materials to survive, that it can cannibalize itself in some version of Nancy Fraser’s argument. This is provided without any historical examination of the real historical conditions through which capitalism has resolved its great accumulation crises.
If you look at history, say, classically at the end of the 19th century, but also in the middle of the 16th century, the Great Depressions were resolved through new ways of imperialism, the securing of new frontiers, especially these four cheaps of labor, food, energy, and raw materials, to fix the over-accumulation problem. That is, the problem where there’s too much capital and not enough profitable investment opportunities.
Harvey went part of the way, and in fact, in his most important work that nobody reads but go read, Limits to Capital from 1982, he says, look, right around the early 20th century, and Luxemburg put her finger on it at that moment, there was a sea change in capitalism, the closure of the frontiers, and then what he calls the law of rising geographical inertia.
Now, interestingly, nobody, I think, except for me, has ever picked up on that. But that means, essentially, there was an intimate connection between capitalism’s famous flexibility and capacity for innovation and its capacity to secure frontiers.
Lo and behold, if we look at the past 50 years, and this is part of my thesis on zombie capitalism, in the productive center, the heart of capitalism, we see long-run productivity stagnation. We see a long-run agricultural productivity stagnation at the very moment when the last meaningful frontiers have been enclosed. Yes, there are frontier spaces in Borneo, Sumatra, in the Amazon, here and there, for sure. But these are no longer or even remotely close to promising to restore the conditions for a new golden age of capitalism, such as existed at previous moments of restructuring. In this long historical cycle of imperialism, frontiers, the acquisition, appropriation of new cheap natures, resolving the crisis, and then, of course, there’s another crisis, another century or so ahead. That’s a story that I tell in Capitalism in the Web of Life and in many, many essays. It’s important to remember those frontiers are now gone. I just have to mention that it’s related to waste frontiers, foremost among them, the atmosphere as a great waste frontier for greenhouse gasses.
Part of what we see in the history of capitalism is that for every moment of externalizing waste and polluting and toxifying the world, for every moment of waste, there’s a complementary moment of laying waste. That’s what we’re seeing in the world today. We’re seeing in the world today the end of capitalism, a climate crisis that is inducing a shift towards geopolitical accumulation, using political and military power to secure the best deal for different capitalist classes in different imperial centers of the world. Talia Baroncelli
Well, the waste thing is quite a big issue. I think it was in one of your books where you mentioned that by 2050, there’ll probably be more plastic in the oceans than fish. That’s an example of where all the [crosstalk 00:28:54]. Jason Moore
And that was optimistic. Talia Baroncelli
That was an optimistic estimate because that was probably in 2017 that you wrote that. Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you. Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon. Jason Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com. Talia Baroncelli
You’ve just been watching part one of my discussion with Jason W. Moore. In part two, we get to some of the strategies that can be deployed by movements to unseat capitalism and the consolidation of the elite power. Thanks for watching.
The Assertion of Popular Power: A Climate Movement Imperative
In part 2, historian and geographer Jason W. Moore explains why climate and revolutionary struggles must understand capitalist dynamics and deploy a language of universal class solidarity to overthrow transnational power structures perpetuating the climate crisis.
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. This is part two of my lively discussion with historian Jason W. Moore. If you’d like to support this content and the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Don’t forget to get onto our mailing list; that way, you’re always up to date every time there’s a new episode. Like and subscribe to the show on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify, as well as on our YouTube channel, and please share the show if you enjoy this content. See you in a bit with Jason.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate, New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and is author of several books, including Anthropocene or Capitalocene? as well as A History of the World and Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Jason W. Moore
Well, it is a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me.
Talia Baroncelli
I’m sure there are some people listening who are thinking, so what? What does this all mean? Why is any of this relevant to have different perspectives or to not focus on this man-made binary with nature? I think if you want to put this analysis into practice, then you have to look at how relevant this could be for the climate struggle.
What would you say to that for revolutionary struggles or for climate movements such as, well, there are several, I’m thinking even Debt-for-Nature or movements which argue for the cancelation of debt, for example, or for other climate groups as well. How important is this adaptation of the language and the perspective that you’re deploying? How important is that for their struggles to be even more effective, or is it more of a linguistic issue?
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, well, of course, it’s not. It isn’t linguistic because language is a crucial nexus of power. I always love it when Marxists who should be committed to the critique of ideology are like, “Oh, that’s just changing the words around.” It’s clearly not. The analysis of the weak links of capitalism that proceeds from man versus nature leads to forms of neo-Malthusian techno-scientific authoritarianism. This is profoundly and thoroughly anti-democratic.
From the origins of second-wave environmentalism, I think of the first Earth Day in 1970, the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. From there onwards, the main ideological message has been listen to the science. Trust us. Give power to the experts. This is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Here, I agree entirely with Naomi Klein about the climate crisis, who basically says, echoing ’60s radicals, “The issue is not the issue.” The issue of the climate crisis is an issue of democracy. It is a crisis of democracy. Therefore, the first step has to be the assertion of popular power over the political structures of the world and to confront the oligarchies, the national security states, and the imperial apparatus in the case of the United States and a few other countries that are fundamentally about the dictatorship of capital.
We should stop pussy-footing around the issue with the illusion that somehow, if only we elect enough social Democrats to parliament, they will legislate socialism, and the climate crisis will go away. That’s not how it’s going to work.
The history of the 20th century, which eco-socialists routinely ignore, is a history of counter-insurgency and regime change politics. It’s baffling to me that folks want to devolve into single-issue politics. Single-issue politics really emerged out of the crisis of Fordism in the 1960s. It was an invention of the new right and then was picked up by elements of a centrist, liberal, professional managerial class strategy. Environmentalism was one of the major ones, not just in the U.S. but in Western Europe.
The result is something like, well, you’re in Berlin now, if I remember right, something like what you see with the German Greens. The German Greens love war. They love war. Look at the civilizational rhetoric coming out of the Greens and the warmongers in Germany right now, which is in the midst of the greatest rearmament since 1936. What could go wrong? Then, we begin to hear that old language of the Civilizing Project. The Russians might look like us, but they’re not us. They don’t value life. Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s Chief Diplomat, is saying, “Well, Europe is the garden, and the rest of the world is the jungle.” Yeah, exactly. This is exactly…
We talk about language. Ideological power flows through language and flows through the power to name. Most so-called radicals around the climate are not saying the problem is capitalism and not just capitalism as some system of corporate power. Yes, corporations, but also the increasingly tight nexus of the bourgeoisie and its political representatives, which is spectacularly advanced or degenerated, as the case may be in the United States, but clear in the U.K. and many other places. The left has been completely destroyed. The proletarian forces have been defeated across the Global North. In the Global South, you see the semi-proletariat organizing, but in very ideologically confused ways.
What’s necessary is clarity, a historical clarity, over the actual dynamics of capitalism in the web of life. And that means that we need a new conceptual apparatus that does involve a different linguistic turn. Let me point out that you understand this, Talia, but some of these idiots in the eco-socialist crowd say, “Well, it’s just language.” Every liberation movement in the modern world ever has insisted on a new language. Why? Because the language of the dominating and exploiting classes is one designed to keep people down. And that’s only intensified in the era of social media and misinformation fetishes and all of that.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. And all knowledge production is a representation of those power relations and inequalities that these movements are also trying to undermine.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
The language is important. But you bring me to my next question then, and I think [Antonio] Gramsci, the Italian thinker and writer, would be really important to bring in at this particular moment. I think it was in 1919, after the April strike, and after he was maybe a bit pessimistic over how the workers’ councils were failing in a way. He wrote more about hegemony and how the issue is perhaps within the mindset of the proletariat or the working classes themselves because the hegemonic values of the bourgeoisie have been inculcated into the mass consciousness of the proletariat. There needs to be a shift in their way of thinking and way of viewing the world.
It sounds to me like you would still view that argument as being extremely pertinent right now, that there still has to be an ideological shift in order for these various climate movements that are so multifaceted, multiracial, and multinational to rise up and form a counter-hegemonic force.
Jason W. Moore
Now, right now, they can’t because they have fetishized nation, they have fetishized race, they have fetishized colonialism. They have fetishized, and therefore, all of these and more. To first lay out all the differences between, if you will, the workers of the world or the world’s semi-proletarians, we have to confront that head-on.
We have to understand that what people are embracing under the sign of decolonize everything and intersectionality is, in fact, a subaltern, if you will, expression of the bourgeois strategy to divide and conquer.
Talia Baroncelli
To break up solidarity, essentially.
Jason W. Moore
Exactly. You want to say, okay, if you’re white, you go over here. If you’re Black, you go over here. If you’re a woman here, a man here, straight here, queer here. All of this is embedded in, say, some of these absurd ideas that circulate within the academy, for instance, of the privilege walk, and of progressive stacking. It is designed to set workers against each other because, of course, there are more of us than there are of them, them being not European white men but the 1%: the owners of capital and the owners and possessors of the means of violence and destruction.
That’s a fairly simple notion, but I would say you invoke Gramsci, and I especially love the historicization of this in 1919 by Gramsci and [Vladimir] Lenin. Let’s remember that Gramsci was a Communist, a class struggle Communist, and a Leninist. What happened in the 1980s and ’90s is all of these professors discovered Gramsci and others that they could turn into professional managerial class toys or puppets, like hand puppets. They could cosplay being revolutionary without having to deal with the excruciating political conjuncture of that moment in 1919, when Lenin, Gramsci, and many others understood the proletarian revolution had been beaten back and defeated in Germany and many other places. Of course, the consequence of that was the rise of [Benito] Mussolini and [Adolf] Hitler.
Talia Baroncelli
Lenin was in prison for many years.
Jason W. Moore
Yes. Of course, Gramsci was put into prison, which is a good reminder: look, if you’re going to organize to take away the wealth and power of the 1%, be ready because they’re not playing around. They’re going to put you in jail. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to send the death squads and the drones. They’re going to dump Agent Orange on you. They’re going to do whatever they need to do to prevent your movement from gaining wealth and from redistributing what is, in the bourgeoisie’s view, their wealth and power. Of course, we understand the sources of all wealth are humans and the rest of nature, as Marx reminds us.
But in 1919, as Gramsci and Lenin were dealing with this problem, Lenin began a famous turn towards national liberation movements. He begins to understand, and this comes together in the famous Baku conference of 1921, that the Archimedean lever of the world-class struggle was in the third world, in the colonial world at the time, in the Global South. This was the Archimedean lever of worldwide class struggle. It wasn’t some simplistic, naive, social democratic workerism. Remember, the Socialists all voted for war in 1914.
We want to understand that history as we look at the present moment and begin to identify a working class as an agent of history that is not the old Eurocentric, economistic, formalist working class. It is what I have argued for: a planetary proletariat, a proletariat, biotariat, and femetariat, unifying paid labor with unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies. Not as a typology, but we are all biotarians now. We are all femetarians. We are all enmeshed in this web of cooperation and proletarian solidarity, at least potentially, but we’ll have to rebuild because the neoliberal ruling classes have really defeated the working classes and also convinced many leftists that they shouldn’t want state power. I see this all the time in the North American Academy. North academics love Indigenous peoples as long as they don’t take power.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just do land acknowledgments, and it is fine.
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, let’s do that, or we could say land acknowledgment and decolonize this. When Evo Morales takes power, they’re like, “Oh, no, we can’t have that.” And what they say is, look, first of all, building socialism is not that easy. And second of all, there’s one group in the world that knows socialism works and that’s the bourgeoisie. They know that socialism works, so they sabotage it, and they impose sanctions. At the heart of it, this goes back to Lenin and Gramsci’s point, at the heart of it, from the standpoint of empire, they don’t care about communism or not. They don’t care what you call your state. What they fear is an independent third world or an independent Global South. That’s why the Americans hated the Soviets. It wasn’t about communism. It was that the Soviets sat on all of that wealth, power, oil, and everything else, and they couldn’t be overthrown until the end of the ’80s when they were overthrown.
Talia Baroncelli
When you speak about the 1% and corporate elite, and if you’re looking at climate movements and young people who are so fed up with power and resources being consolidated in a very specific, narrow corporate class that supports big oil and gas and is also supported by big oil and gas because of all the lobbies, how do you unseat that consolidation of power? Because you could have all the climate movements in the world, but if you have this corporate class that has adopted this form of green capitalism as well as this neoliberal green capitalism of, yeah, we’ll invest in carbon capture and storage and enhance oil recovery to make it look like big oil and gas is cutting emissions and are on the side of the young people. They’re shifting. They have their ecological solutions that aren’t really solutions. I guess there are probably two aspects of that. The language is incredibly important, as you mentioned, but how do we actually unseat those centers of power?
Jason W. Moore
Well, first, we have to have clarity of analysis. What’s often called green capitalism, and your summary is excellent, is, in fact, a post-capitalist strategy for a civilization based on political accumulation. That is one in which there are many of the accoutrements we would associate with capitalism, but it’s fundamentally governed by a political dynamic. I call this the ‘too big to fail dynamic’ out of the phrase that came to fame in the Great Recession, where the big financial institutions were, “Too Big to Fail.” Obama comes in, he bails out the criminal banksters and puts six and a half million people out on the streets. That’s political accumulation. That’s not a very common occurrence in the history of capitalism, but increasingly so because the masters of mankind, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, understand that their grasp on wealth and power depends on politics, on controlling the states and controlling the military and repressive apparatus. Also, the surveillance apparatus, which, as we know, is quite advanced in the U.S. with the very, very tight relationships, really enmeshed, interpenetrating relationships between Silicon Valley capital and the national security state. This has all come out with the Twitter Files and many other reports in recent years.
Talia Baroncelli
With police as well, it seems like the police have some money and funds where they can buy all sorts of surveillance tech.
Jason W. Moore
That’s exactly right. We’ve witnessed not only the massive growth of a surveillance economy but also what David Gordon and Sam Bowles once called the garrison economy, the growth of the guards, the prisons, the police, and everything else.
There’s, I think, a lot of… confusion is the nicest way to put it when we come to these climate justice movements. By and large, they refuse to identify capitalism, and they talk about it as if it’s a system of corporate power. No, it’s a system of class power in which the reproduction of ruling class power depends on what? The control over the state. Yes, they have an ideological apparatus. Yes, there are hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles. But what happened in the 1980s and ’90s is that academics said, “Well, we’re going to talk about counter-hegemony.” Like that’s all about civil society, forgetting or closing their eyes to the reality.
Civil society was an invention of what was called, in 1968, the Cultural Cold War. This very, very intimate connection between what we now call the non-profit industrial sector and cultural counter-insurgency worldwide. This has given rise more recently to what we call Color Revolutions, where you have CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy actively overthrowing, as in Ukraine in 2014, the democratically constituted government. There are many other examples we could provide. But there’s this sense of like, oh, we’re just going to resist, and then somehow the resistance is going to translate into pressure politics that will convince capitalists to give up their wealth and power. This is the Greta Thunberg strategy. And by the way, she’s not new. There’s an exact parallel from 1992, around Rio, with Severn Suzuki, the child of one of Canada’s greatest environmentalists, as I’m sure you know. This is very common. We’re going to talk, we’re going to use all this woke language, but we’re not going to name the centerpieces of the coherent and cohering mechanisms of capitalist class power.
Also, to understand, people are going to say that I’m wrong, but capitalism is dead. Capitalism is in its zombie phase. It’s still moving around. It’s still deadly. But the ways that it has for five centuries overcome its crises no longer exist. Those frontiers of cheap nature are no longer there, but also the frontiers of cheap waste are now gone. What does that mean? Here’s a great example: climate change has already suppressed agricultural productivity. Fully eight years of productivity loss have been recorded. So far, according to the OECD, the 24-member Country Member Club of Rich or Semi-rich Countries, agriculture will absorb half of all the costs of climate change. That’s fundamental because the whole apparatus of capitalism of expelling labor from the countryside rests on agricultural revolutions. Those days are over. Climate-smart agriculture is not going to rescue anything.
Once we begin to develop clarity, then the answer becomes an old-fashioned answer. It’s necessary for the popular forces to seize state power and maintain it at all costs. We know that violence ensues after that, but we also know the violence that ensues from failure. I think of the U.S. interventions, the death squad imperialism in El Salvador in the 1980s, the consequence of the failure or the defeat, rather, of the proletarian forces, the FMLN, in that struggle has led to this dystopian prison industrial hellscape that is El Salvador today. You think that the struggle is indeed worth it. It’s not going to come from just resisting. We saw this with Occupy. You have to have politics.
Talia Baroncelli
What if it’s essentially grassroots? To me, it sounds like you’re saying that these different Indigenous movements, for example, and I think there was something recently in Colombia, even, where they were taking back some of the land and having maybe different councils of how to manage that land. Would you say that that’s not revolutionary enough? Because you’re saying that people need to take [crosstalk 00:21:59]
Jason W. Moore
I would say those are defensive strategies. Defensive strategies, of course, are the order of the day, given still the worldwide political balance of class forces. That’s inevitable. We will have many defensive struggles. They are called resistance struggles. They should be defended. The problem is they don’t meet my criteria for revolutionary action. The criteria is, is this part of a strategy to actually take power and take power away from the bourgeoisie. We know the long and violent history of soft power, hard power, economic hitmen, death squads, and regime change, training the militaries to take power, engage in, and stay in terrorism like the U.S. with contras in Nicaragua. We know what’s coming. This is not going to be a surprise. The ruling class is not going to be somehow convinced.
You mentioned Columbia. Of course, Columbia has long been known as the most dictatorial so-called democracy in the Americas. Twice, FARC has laid down its arms, and twice, what happened? They came back and made them pay for it. I don’t think they’re laying down its arms again. This has to be done in terms of a Gramscian strategy. Gramsci was not like we don’t need to be ready to cede state power; we need to indeed identify, as Marx would say, the rich totality, the rich diversity of struggles, and look for their common threads, and then look for the weak links in the imperialist chains of power. Because, of course, taking state power is not enough.
Look at Venezuela, subject to basically constant sanctions and regime change politics, soft power, color revolution, and mercenaries, undoubtedly financed through the CIA Black Budget coming in. This is the dynamic of our times. I worry that a lot of these resistance struggles… the indigenous peoples in Colombia, they know what this is like. I’m not saying they don’t know what the front lines are, but if you look at what the politics are of social democratic academics and other professionals in the Global North, there is a complete memory holding of all of this history.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
Including in the United States. It’s absurd in the United States where, I mean, for Christ’s sake, the National Security State killed or had Martin Luther King killed.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, of course.
Jason W. Moore
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is like out in a day; this has been reported for three decades, actually, going back to the ’70s. We need to be engaged in defensive struggles. They need to be linked to serious multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist working-class politics. Otherwise, you end up with a rolling series of resistance movements. You have Occupy here. You have the No D’appel over there. You have all of these isolated struggles that don’t ever congeal into actual politics, or they subordinate themselves to social democratic politics. You know this, as you mentioned, growing up in Toronto. You know this from the New Democratic Party. The New Democratic Party never misses an opportunity to move to the right. This is the case for Social Democrats across the world for the past, well, for the past forever.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, that’s also taking place right now in Germany, where the AfD has come to power in certain parts of the country. The Social Democrats started instituting more right-wing policies to try to take back those voters who then went over to the AfD. But it doesn’t work that way. That’s not how you’re going to get people back. You increase your electorate, if you actually have the right left policies that will enable workers to have some better standard of living, rights, and to redistribute resources, and not just, oh, we’re going to have anti-migrant policies.
Jason W. Moore
The liberal diagnosis of the problem is white supremacy.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
That is, for one thing, wrong. Yes, white supremacy is a result of the process, but this is part of the general realignment of social democratic parties, as people like Elizabeth Humphreys have detailed around the neoliberal agenda. Of course, this should not surprise us that Social Democrats, almost without exception, and there are one or two exceptions, move to the right. They cooperate with the deep state. Social Democrats hate the left. They hate the left more than they hate the right. What they want to do is either move right, like you’re saying with the AfD, and this is all across Europe; as you know, the rise of the populist right is channeling working-class outrage at the social democratic and centrist liberal Christian democratic model.
Working class people should be outraged. It’s a failure of the left. It’s a failure of the academic cultures which embraced anything but class leftism, ABC leftism, and refused to keep their hands on the tiller and steer towards the North Star around working class revolution and the expansion of democracy and of working class power. Socialism is not more power for the professional-managerial class. Socialism is more power for the working class.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Having this totalizing view of everything as just being a product of white supremacy, in a way, reinforces those racialized structures and white supremacy because it doesn’t present a threat to the classes that control the modes of production and that are the consolidated bourgeois or rich elite.
Jason W. Moore
Yes.
Talia Baroncelli
If you just focus on that aspect, which is a result and maybe not the driving factor, then you don’t get any real shift in the material conditions or in redistribution of power, any universal working class struggle, which would actually in turn, contribute to the livelihoods of racialized and marginalized people. The outcome of that lens or of that way of understanding the world, in a way, it just reinforces it. It doesn’t lead to any change.
Jason W. Moore
It absolutely reinforces it. We see this around the critique of settler colonialism. What’s the politics of settler colonialism? It’s supposedly ethnic cleansing. The inverse of it is inverted ethnic cleansing. That’s not what we need. We don’t need more nations. We need the proletariat to run the affairs of the planet and to proceed to abolish class distinctions.
Around this question of race and racial capitalism, much of the current vogue is a rejection of the Communist parties; I think in the U.S., the Communist Party USA’s position on multiracial working-class unity, pioneered by people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and many others in this period. I’ve written a little bit about this. I urge people to go back and consider the multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist proletarian strategy, all of which sounds very old-fashioned. It sounds old-fashioned because the neoliberal ideological offensive has memory-holed and destroyed our capacity to remember these traditions. It’s deracinated us, uprooted us from traditions of communists and socialist struggle. Whether we agree with those traditions or not, or we want to advance them, renew them, or be creative around them, we need to remember what they were in order to do that, not simply reinvent woke wheels.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Just one final thing. I don’t know if we’ll have much time to get into this, but if you look at the legal apparatus that’s in place after the First World War and the Second World War, you have the right to self-determination. It’s all this rights framework that is based around the nation state. That in itself is not going to cut it because if you look at, for example, the right to self-determination of Palestinians, I don’t see how having a two-state solution, for example, is all of a sudden going to address all of the issues because ultimately there is a class factor.
As you were talking about the various capitalist ways of cheapening nature and cheapening humans and pulling people into this system which cheapens them, that’s not going to be addressed if you have rights that align with the interests of nation-states and the interests of nation-states also serve the interests of the neoliberal class. I guess we need to get somewhere, and there has to be some sovereignty for the Palestinians, for example. But seeing it as an issue of statehood is, in my view, poorly wrong.
Many of these radlib academics go out and say, “Well, socialism failed. It didn’t do this. It didn’t do that.” It’s like, well, according to whom? I mean, according to those who benefited from the defeat of Nazism, maybe socialism succeeded. Maybe that was what socialism in the 20th century was about. Maybe it was about opening space for third-world movements. Do we think for a minute that Libya went from the most secular and prosperous country in Africa to a country where there are open slave markets on the streets of Bengasi? Do we think that Libya, for a moment, would have been destabilized if the Soviet Union was still around? There’s that naivete that comes from memory-holing history. I called this in one recent essay, The Flight From History. This is what pretty much defines most of this radlib, radical posturing, decolonial set of arguments in the world, and it crucially undermines our capacity to forge the worldwide proletarian solidarity necessary to begin to push at the imperial structures that hold the climate, the capitalogenic climate machine together.
I’ve said this many times. If we want to do something concrete, let’s demand that all of the European armies withdraw from the rest of the world, the American armies. Get the French out of Africa. Get the U.S. out of Africa. Shut down the bases, 700 plus bases, and three new bases in the Philippines to face off against the Chinese now. These are the real coercive instruments of political power. They’re not going to go away because people occupy a town square. Now, occupying a town square may be necessary as part of the struggle. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like Congress is going to convene and say, “Let’s shut down the bases.”
Talia Baroncelli
Well, I think next time we talk, it would be good to do an episode on the various strategies and also real existing socialism. The different experiences of the Soviet Union, for example, and whether this Vanguard strategy that’s driven by a specific party is the way to go or if there could have been correctors to that. That’s a whole other debate, which we could get into next time, and there’s a lot of scholarship on that.
Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon.
Jason W. Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com.
Talia Baroncelli
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Jason Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is a professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Capitalocene or Anthropocene?, Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food.
