Challenging Mainstream Environmentalism: An Eco-Socialist Approach with Jason W. Moore

Ready to challenge your perspective on climate crisis and socialism? Join us as we welcome Jason W Moore. In a riveting discourse, Jason shares his experiences with the eco-socialist movement, shedding light on the challenges and tensions that exist, including his encounters with Monthly Review and its editor John Bellamy Foster. He doesn’t shy away from illuminating the leftist tendency towards sectarianism, nor from elucidating the concept of the "environmentalism of the rich". The dialogue also ponders the need for a united socialist front against mainstream environmentalism and reactionary forces.

Venturing into the intricate intersection of Marxism and environmentalism, we challenge popular narratives around imperialism, class, and climate change debates. Jason opens up about the eco-socialist response to his work, underscoring the significance of a strategic approach to tackle the climate crisis. We also confront the complexities of Prometheanism and its place in leftist ideologies. This episode journeys through the left's perplexing acceptance of the biosecurity state during the pandemic.

Our conversation also dissects the implications of blindly supporting the Democratic Party, addresses the overlooked contribution of the US military to pollution, and probes the relevance of internationalism to eco-socialism. As we wrap up our dialogue, we delve into the lessons of internationalism and socialist history, state socialism lessons and ethical challenges. We muse on capitalism, the environment, and the potential for a communist reimagination of our current crisis. In this thought-provoking discussion, prepare to be enlightened, provoked, and spurred into meaningful dialogue. Don't miss out on this enlightening journey!

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). 

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Tensions and Sectarianism Among Eco-Socialists
• 8:43 Intersections of Marxism and Environmentalism
• 24:49 Imperialism, Class, and the Climate Crisis
• 43:04 Nationalism and Its Impact on Marxism
• 58:00 US, Crises, Ecological Implications
• 1:04:12 Debate on Prometheanism and Socialist Projects
• 1:16:11 The Left's Acceptance of Biosecurity State
• 1:31:50 Reflections on Trump and Techno Dystopia
• 1:38:54 Imperialism and the Climate Crisis
• 1:49:17 Lessons of Internationalism and Socialist History
• 1:56:45 State Socialism Lessons and Ethical Challenges
• 2:09:34 Communist Recommends Website for Further Information

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:47

Hello, welcome to our blog. And today I'm with Jason W Moore, environmental historian, historical geographer at Binghampton University, where he is a professor of sociology. He is the author, our editor, of Capitalism and the Web of Life Anthropocene or Capitalistine. I read the non-English title and co-author, Raj Patel, of A History of the World and Seven Chief Things. You coordinate the World Ecology Research Network and you are very much in the kind of eco-socialist milieu, broadly speaking, right? Is that fair to say it?

Jason W. Moore: 1:42

depends on who you ask. Okay, For some, like my one-time friend and comrade John Bellamy Foster, I am, and I quote, an enemy of eco-socialism. Wow yeah be careful who you cross.

Jason W. Moore: 1:58

How did that happen? Well, that's a good question indeed. How did it happen? I think that we have to ask him about that.

Jason W. Moore: 2:07

I think that there is a long tradition of sectarianism on the left. I've written about this, about the tendency to convert ideas into belief structures, into dogmas, and those who call for a rethinking and a reimagination of those dogmas, keeping the baby throwing out the bathwater, are often labeled as apostates and as enemies of socialism, of the working class. There's a very long history of this kind of behavior, unfortunately, and it's a tragedy in the case of Monthly Review, one of the few surviving institutions of the American left, which at one time had a very ecumenical and broad socialist left critique, especially around the questions of anti-imperialism. Those are, as you know and many will know, at the center of my work, and so there is a tension between the sectarianism of eco-socialists, not just Bellamy Foster, but a number of others, who have essentially chosen to denounce me as outside of Marxism and outside of eco-socialism, notwithstanding my commitment to a class struggle, anti-imperialist analysis of capitalism and the web of life.

C. Derick Varn: 3:25

Well, this is beyond just the scope of eco-socialism. But that tendency, I think, tends to get worse after some kind of perceived defeat, either revolutionary or, in most cases, actually electoral, and we've seen a lot of retrenchment back to sectarianism in the last three years. I think we've seen a ton of it actually. And mentioning Monthly Review, Monthly Review is an odd beast to me because it starts off as one of the most ecumenical left sources and it is selectively so. Now, let's just put it that way, let's not say it's not ecumenical at all. I mean, they'll even publish non-Marxist sometimes, but it's in. Its sectarian concerns are actually somewhat opaque. It's partly defending the legacy of Paul Suizi, partly seems to have a very particular reading of anti-imperialism these days, and it also has a very particular segment of eco-socialism in which it is attached. So, yeah, it's funny, because I was not aware that it had gotten that heated, but I had gathered for some, for some criticisms, that there was tensions in the eco-socialist world, so to speak.

Jason W. Moore: 5:02

Well, tensions are good. Right, we want tensions, we want comradely debate. This was something that I dealt with Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review For many years before my book came out, and I made repeated entries to him that we engage in a generative and comradely dialogue that acknowledged, frankly, significant differences over the reading of the history of capitalism, the reading of Marx, the reading of the climate crisis and planetary crisis, but also that we acknowledged significant commonalities to build a united socialist front against the forces of reaction, mainstream environmentalism, which what I call the environmentalism of the rich, and so on and so forth. And all of these were rebuffed repeatedly.

Jason W. Moore: 5:49

So this is not simply a quibble, which a lot of academics treated as such. It is, as you say, a symptom of the left's crisis, and I think you're exactly right that when we look at what's happened over the past few years, especially across the pandemic, we see the utter bankruptcy of left liberal elements that used to in some way defensive liberties organized against the war, organized against the threat of nuclear war, organized against the national security state and those left liberal elements have been completely made captive to the centrist liberalism of the two-party duopoly in the United States and elsewhere. There are cognate experiences elsewhere, of course.

C. Derick Varn: 6:39

Yeah, it's actually kind of stunning how it carries out throughout the capitalist world, including in places that do not have the same political structure as the United States. Let's get to this ideological notion of, say, the environmentalism or collegeism of the rich. Why has there been kind of an issue with Marxist, who either either kind of accept standard liberal environmentalism on face value, even though they might have a class critique of broader institutions, or utterly reject environmentalism as such, start talking about hyper-productivist, smokestack socialism etc and the need for massive reindustrialization and things that sound good if you don't think about externalities at all. So why do you think that's been the case with so many Marxists?

Jason W. Moore: 8:03

Well, let's start with the first part of your question and then, derek, remind me of the second if I don't pick it up. So the first part, I think, is about what gives, with the inverse of what used to be called a watermelon politics of green on the outside, red on the inside. What we have now is red on the outside and green on the inside. And that's not to say that these people are not socialists, they're not Marxist. I'm not reading anyone out of any group. I want to be clear on that. However, it's been my position that this is particularly the standpoint of the political and intellectual field around monthly review for a very long time. Now I want readers to not take my word for this. Please go to John Bellamy Foster's the Vulnerable Planet, which he published in 1994. And look right around page 30, and you can see him endorse what Paul Airelek and John Holdren's IPAT formula. Impact equals population times, affluence times, technology. So Paul Airelek, if that name sounds familiar, was author of the population bomb, arguably the definitive and most influential text of mainstream environmentalism from its publication in 1968, all the way well to the present moment. And then from there, bellamy Foster endorses Bill Caddon's. William Caddon's overshoot, another classic Maltesean text from the end of the 1970s, maybe 1980.

Jason W. Moore: 9:31

And from there we get a definition of capitalism. That is Schumpeter, the famous conservative economist who hated Marxism and derided it as silly. And just so much magic. This is from the greatest, supposedly the greatest, marxist and socialist thinker of our times. So his framing for both the political economy of the environment very much rests on a kind of green materialism which, on the final analysis, is what Marxist used to call a vulgar materialism. A vulgar materialism is something like when you say that fossil fuels cause climate change. Well, fossil fuels don't cause climate change. Coal is just a rock in the ground. Oil is liquid buried under the surface. It only becomes a fossil fuel under definite relations of class, capital and empire. That might seem like a fine point, but it's not, because vulgar materialism is a family of thinking that includes environmental determinism. That has long been a bastion of right wing thinking. Now why?

Jason W. Moore: 10:39

I think this goes to a longer history of environmentalist thinking in the modern world, and let me just summarize it briefly. We know it best from Maltese, but it has antecedents before Maltese, with people like John Locke and Bacon and Descartes. Basically, what Maltese did? He wasn't talking about population as such. It was the end of the 18th century, it was a moment of significantly unfavorable climate and it was a moment, not coincidentally, of the most unprecedented revolts against capitalism that the capitalist order had yet seen.

Jason W. Moore: 11:13

So Maltese is writing here. His first essay is published in 1798. Basically what he's doing is he is explaining and justifying inequality on the basis of natural law, not enclosure and exploitation. So it's a classic natural law argument where he's using science, good science, to justify a species of policy that we would today call neoliberal, but essentially looking to balance the crisis and the problems of capitalism on the backs of the poor. And that recurs. It recurs through eugenics in the late 19th century. It recurs through forms of environmental neomultusianism from 1968 in earnest.

Jason W. Moore: 11:55

So there is a reluctance on the part of Marxist but not only Marxist to look at this history of good science and environmentalist thinking as specifically a class project of the imperial bourgeoisie. I've argued going back all the way to the 16th century, but especially in its mature form from the time of Maltese at the end of the 18th century. And there's a blind spot. There's something that's happened with eco-socialists that they don't look at a historically grounded critique of what Marx and Engels called ruling ideas, that is, of ideologies that are so powerful. We don't even take into consideration that man versus nature are ideological constructs.

C. Derick Varn: 12:45

It is interesting how many of these early bourgeois constructs are accepted at face value. Man versus nature. I mean, I don't always love Timothy Morton's work and I don't know that I would consider him an eco-socialist either, but some of the philosophical points he's made about the whole concept of nature as a strain from man gets you into all kinds of intellectual cul-de-sacs, because on one hand it's everything an undifferentiated and thus you can't really speak about it. On the other hand it's something fundamentally inhuman which exempts humans from participation and the whole. It just muddles everything on the instance the moment you start speaking that way. And yet I even found myself struggling to articulate how I talk about this without some of these words.

C. Derick Varn: 13:40

And I think that does get to the ideological point. The fad for the last 15 years has been talking about the Anthropocene, which there is a kind of general Marxist critique. But you have said in a book now, but in multiple other places as well, that that critique itself doesn't go far enough at what's going on in the problems with the Anthropocene. So what is and I realize this is a big question but what is your general feeling about the Anthropocene as an explanatory periodization of right now and what are the limits to it that Marxists see and the ones that they don't see?

Jason W. Moore: 14:35

Well. So I think the stock and trade of the Ecosocialist critique is that the Anthropocene is flawed because it attributes responsibility to all human beings and in fact, the groups of human beings what I would call the imperial bourgeoisie, but also the bourgeoisies and independent formations are responsible for the climate crisis. So okay, that's fine and good. But again, going back to our last back and forth, there's an ideological moment and a historical moment to this that is almost universally denied by Marxists, never mind all the so-called critical intellectuals there say oh, anthropocene, plantationocene, capitalocene, it doesn't really matter, the hell, it doesn't matter. Well, first of all, let's remark upon the complete unoriginality of the Anthropocene as a geological concept. Everything in the Anthropocene, which is coined by Eugene Sturmer and Paul Crutzen right around the turn of the last century, everything in the Anthropocene concept was already present in the Holocene concept from the late 19th century, including the notion of humans as a geological force. One of the crucial blind spots of Marxism as it relates to the Anthropocene is a complete historical short-sightedness. So there seems to be very little curiosity in the ecosystem Marxist imagination these days about what actually happened over the long jure a class society and climate change, going back to the mid-Holocene even. And if we did that, we would begin to see that class society, from the formation of the first city-states, from the so-called urban and agricultural revolutions, that these class societies were already geological forces. This is drawn from the work of William Ruderman, who has a Malthusian explanation, but I would add a crucial Marxist intervention here that class society is not humans in general, because humans in general that's not an actor. Institutions, classes, armies, churches, markets, those can be historical forces, but man in general is not an actor. And indeed that was where Marx begins with the critique of historical materialism. We can come back to that in a moment. But anyway, to circle back to this point, that Holocene climate stability was made by the carbonizing impact of the formation and elaboration of class societies six, seven, eight thousand years ago, and this is clearly obvious in the geological record we can see that the interglacial period of the Holocene does not revert to an ice age in the way that previous interglacial periods did.

Jason W. Moore: 17:27

That seems fairly straightforward. That class societies were a geological force, from their origins in fact, and that capitalism in particular was a profound geological force, a geobiological force from the century after 1492. This is the great contribution of the geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin in London writing about the so-called Orbus Spike, which essentially refers to the carbon drawdown atmospheric carbon drawdown in the century after 1492 that resulted from the genocides of the New World. And make no mistake, it was a genocide. There would have been a certain number of horrific casualties regardless of the invasion, but the slaving induced. The cheap nature, cheap labor force of the invasion meant that a 25 to 35 percent reduction in population became a 95 percent reduction in population. That in turn impacted the global climate, which in turn reshaped the whole political economy and political ecology of capitalism in the century and a half after 1550.

Jason W. Moore: 18:35

Now the typical Marxist version and critical intellectual version of this is completely unconcerned with this history, and this is maybe, derek, you have some ideas about why this is. This is completely bizarre to me. I think that it represents the final or one of the final victories of the neoliberal end of history, triumph of essentially telling critical intellectuals, marxist thinkers, activists don't pay any attention to the history. It doesn't matter. But there's a valuable lesson in this long history and we can tease out some of the details, but all the way back to the Bronze Age crisis, right around 1200 BCE, to the crisis of Western Rome to the crisis of feudalism, to the crisis of this early capitalist period between 1550 and 1700.

Jason W. Moore: 19:25

I was just talking about unfavorable moments of climate change are moments of political possibility for the direct producers and reproducers. This is not a climate doom moment, but a moment of destabilization of the underlying conditions of ruling class power. This is a moment of ruling class power whenever there are massive and significantly unfavorable climate changes. Without this historical knowledge, we succumb to the climate doomism that is now hegemonic on the left, and it's a neoliberal con job. I don't know how else to say it. This is an environmentalist con job of repent. The end is near, the doom we're doomed. And if we're not doomed, we all have to succumb to the climate emergency politics of folks like Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum or the centrist liberal war machine in Washington DC.

C. Derick Varn: 20:19

There's. It is amazing to me how we went from fighting climate change, denialism and whatever to essentially both sides agreeing well, there's nothing to be done at this point, it's all too late, or there's very little to be done, but it's going to be draconian and involve the military. I mean, I actually have some friends who really do believe that and that's kind of shocking to me. I mean one I do know a lot of the environmental history, I'm like, but we've gone through pretty big I mean disastrously a lot of the times but pretty big environmental changes in the past. They have not been as severe as what looks like it's on the horizon but which I don't want to sound like I am dismissing it, but we have seen human societies adjust before. The complexity of the current problem is it does complicate things. I mean, how would complexity not complicate things? But so that's all there, and so I agree with you on that.

C. Derick Varn: 21:35

I guess my two really unscientific and vulgar instincts I mean I'll admit the vulgar is that looking at periods before capital is not done because a fear of taking the critique of capital and making it look trans-historical, which could be accused of being primitivist or creating iron walls of history that aren't based on just the quote, modes of production et cetera, which could also be read as pushing back on the seeming inevitability of socialism, although that last bit is something that most socialists speak out of both ends of their mouths about these days.

C. Derick Varn: 22:29

So it's hard to know. So that's my gut instinct about what's going on there. I definitely see it. I definitely see this refusal to engage with the long past, and I don't just see it on climate. Frankly. I see it on studying class societies before modern capitalism in general, trying to ask questions about, say, the kind of mixed nature of economies in feudal Europe, or looking at modern research on the various Roman crises and this relationship to climate change and all this stuff. I don't see a lot of it coming out of Marxist circles. I actually see, sadly, I see most of it coming out of liberal circles. So it does seem to be a real tendency, and one of the things that seems to drive a whole lot of the eco-socialist discourse is avoiding being called a primitivist, which is a problem because it's almost always unfair.

Jason W. Moore: 23:44

But there are really striking tendencies towards peasantism, a kind of neo-neurotanism, that are I don't know if they're socialist or not, but associated, say, with the work of Johann Martínez-Alié and Eduardo Godinas and others who have this I mean frankly, retrograde, romantic view of peasant society.

C. Derick Varn: 24:10

But yeah, there's that. How much of that is explicitly tied to Maoism?

Jason W. Moore: 24:20

Well, is it a reaction against Maoism? I don't know. And what kind of Maoism?

C. Derick Varn: 24:25

Yeah, that's also true.

Jason W. Moore: 24:27

Also. I mean, and we can dig into that, but in this case, you look at, those tendencies are explicitly anti-communist, anti-Marxist. They are a great example of what Michael Perente used to call ABC leftism anything but class leftism.

C. Derick Varn: 24:50

So, as a person who is interested in both imperialism and class, and I think your work is kind of hard to place, and, for example, these current debates on growth and degrowth, where some of the bright greeners basically do not talk about imperialism very much at all, and then you have people who have some very on the degrowth side, who have some very interesting, I think fair critiques of what we'd have to do to ecologically balance out the different parts of the globe as far as how to handle the climate crisis and not, but they kind of get painted as trying to pulpitize the world. So, and conversely, there is a sense in which some of the degrowth arguments, I also think, aren't particularly clear or, in some cases, not even particularly honest. So it does seem like we're stuck in a paradigm where the two dominant debates are really vulgar. How do you think we got there?

Jason W. Moore: 26:09

Well, I think the neoliberal triumph and the smashing of the world left, the destruction of the proletarian and peasant forces following the late 1970s, are huge parts of that. One of the things that seems to characterize a lot of degrowth, eco-socialist, green new deal thinking is the illusion of parliamentary socialism, and I think this actually speaks to the question of what is to be done once victory is won. But as we know from the history of 20th century national liberation movements, including its socialist elements, the mantra of the imperialist forces was in order to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it. And this history of counter-revolution is so salient, so continuous, so violent that the brain eraser of the climate crisis and climate doomism seemingly has just evaporated that entire history. I mean, it's not only the counter-revolutionary blood bath of, say, jakarta in 1965 or Chile in 1973. It's also the history of a fairly modest left social democratic, reformist government in the UK, with the election of the Wilson government in 1974, that is subjected to a soft coup with the connivance of the IMF, the CIA, mi5 and MI6. This is not a conspiracy theory. This has been widely aired, even by the BBC. It's called Britain's version of Watergate and it's clear that even under a very reformist and fairly mild reformist governments in the 1970s. Michael Manley's. Jamaica is another example.

Jason W. Moore: 28:10

All around the world you saw counter-revolution. So I think in some ways this discussion of what is to be done after puts the cart ahead of the horse. We need to have a very sober appreciation of the actual balance of class forces and the likelihood that some techno-scientific authoritarian system that resembles capitalism but is not quite that, that really puts politics in command, a form of political accumulation, as Bob Brenner might say will win the day. I mean, this would be what Samir Amin used to call a decadent transition, where the ruling class personnel remain the same or essentially the same, maintain their accumulations of wealth and power and then go out and try to deal with the climate crisis on the basis of well, their program is already laid out in the open Planetary stewardship, nature, positive planetary management, that whole scheme.

Jason W. Moore: 29:17

Of course, this is the unholy alliance of the World Economic Forum and Davos on the one hand, and the Pentagon, wall Street, washington complex on the other hand, and there are real fractures in the world, as we know from Belt and Road. That doesn't say that Belt and Road promises planetary socialism, far from it, but there are these competing visions for how to navigate the climate crisis that I think a lot of the eco-socialists left is completely unprepared to deal with, both deepening what I've called World War III, but a new 30 years war that is now in motion, whose flashpoint is the Ukraine. That's one moment of it. But then the mirage, the illusion of parliamentary socialism, which is quite ingrained in European and American leftists.

C. Derick Varn: 30:14

It's so ingrained I have trouble even asking a question about it, because I'm trying to break people out from parliamentary and congressional models of socialism or even tailing that. So people who think they're critiquing that but still end up tailing it are effectively still engaging in it. That's been really hard since I guess actually since in America since Occupy Since Occupy was such a fantastic blow-up in the other direction that there's been this massive overcorrection into parliamentarianism. And even when you push people on like even when you have people who are critiquing the DSA's relationship to the Democrats, their answer is still largely oh, we need a third party and the structural incentives there you're not really getting.

Jason W. Moore: 31:22

I mean as a propaganda campaign. That's correct, that parliamentary politics, electoral politics, has a place. There are people there, there are hearts and minds and everything else there. But then the challenge is I think this is very much what you're getting at is that there must be a sweet spot between the politics and the syndicalism and the neighborhood organizing, and this is historically where socialist parties on the left have excelled, not without an uneven track record, but this is something that revolutionary parties can do.

C. Derick Varn: 32:03

Yeah, I think it's the one thing you don't want to do, though, as a revolutionary party, is be stuck actually managing a capitalist government which you can't transition because that's just going to discredit you and historically always has Like I don't have a counter example? Well, social.

Jason W. Moore: 32:23

Democrats always move right and the possibilities are sometimes glimpsed because there will be left socialist tendencies, like in British labor in the mid-1970s where people like Tony Ben wanted to chart a different course, to nationalize industries and hand them over to worker cooperatives. Dynamics like that are suggestive. That's another program in itself that are suggestive of what is to be done. This is why national liberation movements that have been socialist projects break out in the semi-periphery and periphery of the world, that they are very much faced with an either or revolutionary situation. There's no room for compromising with the bourgeoisie, which is hell-bent on their extermination.

C. Derick Varn: 33:11

That's a key point.

Jason W. Moore: 33:14

Always forgotten, right? We're supposed to demonize every state socialist project somehow for getting the murderous campaigns of empires again and again and again and again to destroy them.

C. Derick Varn: 33:31

I think and this is where I have a very complicated view on things because, on one hand, I think we do have to address the actual existing contradictions of actual existing socialism, as definitely the book says, and there's a tendency to there's kind of a vulgar tendency to be like, well, you can't critique whatever China is doing. Because of blah, however, and I tend to react against that. But, however, here is like we do have to put all this in the context of a world capitalist system, and sometimes your critiques have to be more of the. They probably didn't have a choice, or the choices were all bad, and we have to deal with that. I just think we also have to admit that those choices were bad and not and just say Well, sometimes they were.

Jason W. Moore: 34:28

Sometimes they were eminently reasonable under difficult circumstances, right.

C. Derick Varn: 34:35

Well, my big one, that I even defend against a lot of contemporary actually a lot of contemporary malice is I'm a defender of the Cultural Revolution, oh yeah sure, the standard of living in the countryside increases during the Cultural Revolution period.

Jason W. Moore: 34:49

It was an extraordinary period because Mao, who was out of power and I know you know this, but just for your listeners, who may know this as well Mao comes back and sees the capitalist rotors taking over, led by whom? Well, deng Xiaoping. And so it's a class revolt against the nomenclature in the Chinese Communist Party and an attempt to stave off the capitalist restoration which, of course, then is set in motion earnestly after 1979. Right?

C. Derick Varn: 35:20

And I think this discussion leads to a whole lot of people who say we need to defend China, of which I agree with them, by the way, I am generally a.

Jason W. Moore: 35:27

Right, but that's a different argument, right.

C. Derick Varn: 35:29

Yeah, a Chinese defensist, but that there's this whole, like well, but capitalist rotorism, that's really a Western critique. I mean no, it's not, it was internal to China itself. Like yeah, well, that's exactly right. So I mean these things are important and I guess this should tie us in my critique of a lot of the, a lot of the growth Marxist, the green growth Marxist, as opposed to the Promethean ones, and we'll get to the Prometheanism in a little bit, the green growth Marxist you're thinking of.

C. Derick Varn: 36:04

Matt Huber, who's I mean kind of a friend of mine, but nonetheless I think he's very much in this camp. Lee Phillips, who I'm even more ambivalent. Ambivalence maybe too nice of a word.

Jason W. Moore: 36:20

He doesn't make it easy to make friends with him.

C. Derick Varn: 36:22

Yeah, yeah, exactly A lot of these guys. I think Huber isn't quite as guilty of this as Phillips is, but like there is a tendency to not really discuss the world system, at all.

Jason W. Moore: 36:41

Imperialism is their Achilles heel Right and in fact when we're talking about Egos, socialism, that there's a massive rift in the world today and Ecosocialists in the North are generally very soft on the question of imperialism. In the South, of course, there is a longstanding anti-imperialist critique. So for the arguments I make around a world ecological Marxism, that is, an anti-imperialist critique of capitalism and the web of life, there's a very different response in the global South and also in countries like Ireland that have a long history of being facing the gun barrel of empire. So we want to always break that down as well, that imperialism is alive and well. Imperialism is how the bourgeoisie prefers to wage the class struggle. It's not this bullshit settler colonial trope that has been separated from class analysis, but directly how capital wants to wage the class war.

Jason W. Moore: 37:46

Now, of course, the problem with growth and I don't know that Lee and Matt would disagree is the problem with growth is that it's an imperial economic category. Of course, as Timothy Mitchell has shown, john Maynard Keans comes up with national accounting, economic accounting and GDP growth accounting in the late teens in the India Home Office, which was the successor to the East India Company and then is widely elaborated in the post-war developmentalist project under American hegemony. So this is my beef with growth and degrowth that garbage in, garbage out, fetish in, fetish out. Now that might be a little harsh. There are many great people Jason Hickle is a great anti-imperialist thinker within degrowth and there are others. But when you start with a fetish, you'll end with a fetish. When you start with nature and society, you end with that. You cannot engage in a revolutionary critique of the system by using the system's intellectual categories. That's what we have to take that to heart.

Jason W. Moore: 38:49

So my point about green growth is that it's delightfully unspecific and I would say two things. First, going back to Mao, we need to be not just red an expert, but green red an expert. So we need to really develop the kinds of scientific and engineering capacities that would foreground and prioritize technical modes of addressing the climate crisis, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation. That would be appropriate. There's an older discourse of appropriate technology and it has its strengths and weaknesses, but we need to think in terms of that. And then also let's face facts that most of the energy and commodity production, human labor, raw materials and everything else that goes on under advanced capitalism is deeply and incredibly wasteful and that we could survive without planned obsolescence. We could rebuild the cities, we could rebuild the electrical grids, rebuild housing. We could reimagine a world that, yes, would involve significant reconstruction, but not in some sort of abstract way. We'd look at, and I think here the experience of state socialist projects and rebuilding after devastating world wars could be very salient indeed.

Jason W. Moore: 40:11

The Soviets have over 20 million homeless people in European Russia in 1945. What did they do? And what they did was they engaged in the greatest housing construction project in the history of humankind. It seems to me that there are lessons to be drawn from those experiences, but for many of the folks and perhaps Hubert and Phillips and others have elaborated their more specific program around this and drawn on these historical experiences, I don't know, but we need to draw on these experiences of how do you build the infrastructures of housing and health care and education, in short, of social reproduction for the vast majority. How do we do that? In a relatively egalitarian way, and there are clear lessons to be drawn.

C. Derick Varn: 41:03

And I guess that does bring us back to the imperial context in a sense, because one of the things of the eco-socialist project I think has to deal with is that it must be a global project, even though I've always thought fighting capitalism must also be a global project. There is some plausible and not completely insane denial on that. I don't think you can deny that when you start talking about climate, like the interconnected systems do not give a shit about anything because they're systems and thus do not give a shit about national boundaries, and because of that it does kind of put the internationalization at the forefront in ways that you can kind of get around in other parts of socialist struggle if you try. And, like I said, to some degree plausibly, one of the things that I think that I've seen over the last decade and I would like to maybe get you to talk about this a little bit how it relates to eco-socialism is a kind of methodological nationalism to everything. And this is not to say that all nations are going to go away overnight, although if I'm a betting man, if things continue the way they are right now, I'm not putting my money on a lot of them surviving the century. But let's say, you stabilize things and we don't go down this neoliberal hellhole that looks like we might be going down, it becomes pretty clear to me that we have to not do or limit ourselves to national analysis.

C. Derick Varn: 43:05

To me, that's where a lot of this growth the growth of the growths eco-socialists get stuck is because their projects and their levers for pulling on those projects, like the Green New Deal etc. Are explicitly national. They don't really have a framework for them to be internationalized. No one's calling for a red-green international. Maybe somebody has, but I really haven't seen it. They haven't talked about how seriously who would be involved, how you'd wait stuff, how you would deal with all the fact that most international institutions are currently neoliberal, how that would address legal national challenges, not just in the core but also in the semi-paritory. These are things you'd have to be much more serious about. Honestly, for these not to be limited nationally and thus not to be limited in effectiveness, both in terms of fighting capitalism but also in terms of mitigating the climate crisis, it has to necessarily deal with that. What do you think is driving this methodological nationalism? Because it seems to be slightly deeper than just a parliamentary socialist fetish.

Jason W. Moore: 44:32

Well, it's actively reproduced by the universities which I call after Mario Savio, the knowledge factories. And the knowledge factories are there to really fulfill two major functions. One of them is to train the cadres the engineers, the experts, the doctors, the lawyers, all of the professional cadres that make capitalist society run, and then also to discipline the intellectuals and to prevent intellectuals from getting dangerous ideas. One of the best ways to keep intellectuals from having dangerous ideas is to short circuit their internationalism and their internationalist imagination, except when it occurs through acceptable institutions of international governance like the United Nations and Human Rights Work and Development Work, and all of that. There's a lot of different dynamics, institutionally, ideologically and in terms of the instrumental knowledges that capitalism needs to produce. I've noticed a version of what you've described in the climate and environmental studies fields where, instead of looking for more and more outside the box, heterodox, creative, dynamic thinking, the scholarship has become more fragmented, more historically shallow, with less of an ideological critique of the largest questions of our days. We might wonder where is the Jared Diamond or Yuval Harari of the left? There are some compelling figures, I don't mind. There are people like Jason Hickle and others, but these are generally few and far between. The universities don't want them, they don't want to hire. On that basis, there's a major complicity of the knowledge factory itself, I think, in terms of providing the cadres, both that go into the NGO industrial complex, but also those who are scholars, who are teaching and writing and have influence in those ways.

Jason W. Moore: 46:44

What's happened, very much in tune with what you're saying, is what I've called the flight from world history, and it's necessarily a flight from internationalism. I've been banging the drum on this I don't know who's listening, but let's get together if you are listening and you want to do something about this that there is a long history of anti-imperialist critique of the worldwide class struggle and the web of life that goes back, of course, to Marx, but also Lenin and Luxembourg, and Franz Fanon and Emmanuel Wallerstein and Amal Khair, cabral, walter Rodney. These are internationalists who were especially that last grouping of Wallerstein, cabral, rodney, samir Amin, who were actually wrestling with precisely the issues that you just flagged of how to deal with the question of nation and national imaginaries and national boundaries in the struggle for world socialism. We don't even talk about world socialism anymore. If you utter those words, they sound alien.

C. Derick Varn: 47:56

Right. People complain about the patriotic socialist movement, and they should. But my sly critique has been but you guys laid the groundwork for that with all this parliamentary methodological nationalism for the past decade and a half. Anyway, While you're mad at people for saying the quiet parts too loud, let's be honest about this there's been a massive return to bourgeois nationalism.

Jason W. Moore: 48:30

You see this especially amongst critical intellectuals who speak about settler colonialism and then indigeneity, where in some cases certainly not all, but in some cases, and there is a significant minority tendency that embraces the blood and soil nationalism, a kind of woke clash of civilizations, and has completely disarmed us from a critique that foregrounds the dialectics of race, nation and class.

Jason W. Moore: 49:03

Of course, virtually any Native American reservation in North America sees not people outside of capitalism but fully formed class societies. Yes, they're definitely underdeveloped, peripheral, desperately impoverished and oppressed class structures, but nevertheless they are class structures. There has, exactly as you say, there's been a massive turn on the part of critical intellectuals back to methodological nationalism. Even where they do gesture towards globalism, it's most often an anti-Marxist globalism which looks like the celebration of this mid-century thinker, karl Polanyi, where the famous book called the Great Transformation very interesting book a theory of the alternation between market-centered societies and then what he called self-protecting societies. No theory of exploitation in this. This is what Marx gives us a theory of exploitation in the web of life that is also a class-centered theory of revolution that's completely abstracted from the globalist. We have an abstract nationalism and localism and then abstract globalism. What we need is the weaving of those conditions from the standpoint of the planetary proletariat.

C. Derick Varn: 50:27

The inability, I think, for us to think about the planetary proletariat, and I think a good way of phrasing it is, you see, in the fact that while there's these two tendencies, I think those are basically critical, intellectual, bourgeois tendencies, but Marxism as it currently exists right now in the non-China developed world, I don't think we can call China semi-perthory anymore. Sorry, not sorry to you, I know my audience is going to be there. There's a couple of people who, like well, wallerstein said I'm like yeah, wallerstein said that in the 90s.

C. Derick Varn: 51:07

Wallerstein said a lot of things, that's all right, but I do think we have to separate out the developed world here in China being developed but its own thing. In the developed world, we have this Marxism that tails these two tendencies. So, even though they look diametrically opposed yes, you have patriotic socialists fighting with social Democrats they have similar assumptions, like the number of Marxists I know who incorporate Keynesian or Polanian assumptions probably is greater than the number of Marxists I know who don't. Frankly, while I think it's important to have discussions around money, I think it's important to discuss MMT, these kinds of things. I think you have to do it critically. I also think we need to put a lot of this in the context of its origins, not just to be like oh, some genetic fallacy, oh, just because it's imperial, it's bad.

C. Derick Varn: 52:25

But the Keynesian internationalism that came out of Keynes was one of the capitalist order research, I think, pulling from the work of Claire Mathai a little bit, that dealt with the 40s crisis that everybody thought, and I think even a lot of capital thought, was going to end capitalism. I think Schupender thought that, for example, that was still an imperial project and we need to acknowledge and deal with that. If you don't, if you're just like, oh, there's this nice continuity and there's not really that much conflict between the Keynesians and the Marxist system. You're not dealing with the imperialism inherent in that project at all. That's very well put.

C. Derick Varn: 53:19

Yeah, and almost all of those answers too, are nationalist answers and attempts to get around that tend to be kind of dishonest, I think, ubiquitous in the Marxist circle, because Marxism since 1992, I think I was actually reading Alvin Gouldner's Two Marxisms, which is old now, but it's interesting to read a book about Marxism that's like a self-critique from the 70s, where everything seems to be having a crisis yet. Also, things seem to be on the up and up, as opposed to post-1992, where it's like well, there's China and Cuba and Vietnam, that's what we got, a DPRK if we're being particularly expansive. It is interesting that it does seem like the response to a kind of 70s crisis of Western Marxism has been to unconsciously and I don't think it's conscious, but unconsciously retreat into prior bourgeois-mosa thinking, as opposed to like okay, let's admit there's a problem in the Marxism, let's go ahead and say that, but let's deal with this on our terms, not theirs, which is what I would hope we do.

Jason W. Moore: 55:02

Well, let me tell you a little bit about how I responded to this, because one of the symptoms of what you've just laid out quite masterfully is the divorce between Marxist ecological thought and Marxist political economy. And so when I first began writing on these questions almost 15 years ago, I identified two friends and teachers of mine, john Bellamy Foster and David Harvey, as embodying this divorce of these two domains. Of course, john Bellamy Foster is heir to Baran and Suize in the theory of monopoly capital, which is, by the way, a quite revisionist approach in terms of the law of value and falling rate of profit and all that, absolutely that's not saying it's wrong.

Jason W. Moore: 55:50

To be revisionist is not wrong, but given that he's really been thumping his chest about how true to Marx he is, it's time that some Marxists actually say that's bullshit. And so there is the theory of monopoly capital, the tendency of the surplus to rise, that whole model completely separate from his model of planetary crisis, which is basically a green model, a catastrophist model. Capitalism will continue, as he quotes the German greens, until the last tree is cut, so on and so forth. David Harvey, who's much more on my wavelength than and now, did the same thing. However, he had this famous statement of historical materialism in the web of life, in justice, nature and the geography of difference in the mid-90s, where he says all social projects are ecological projects and vice versa, but then never really put that into conversation with his political economy of crisis, the theory of the spatial fix built environments, of our accumulation crisis. And I've argued, building on the work of James O'Connor, amongst others, that we need a dialectical historical materialism that is also a political economy of capitalism in the web of life to put these moments together, and it's politically. I'll say just a snippet of what I've done, but I think it's politically necessary to guard against the creeping neo-Maltusianism that comes into play in a lot of eco-socialist thought. The way that it comes into play is not through population and that vulgar populationism, but through a vulgar resource determinism. So this is the case, for instance, with Andreas Malm's fossil capital, and people don't realize that they're retreating to a bourgeois approach to resource economics when they invoke fossil capital. But that's exactly what it is and you can go and consult his book and look at his diagram of the circuit of capital, which, by the way, is totally revisionist because there's already a moment for Cole and Marx's scheme, which is the circulating moment of constant capital. That's a segue to my approach, which is to really try to identify why is that? The US, periodic, cyclical, great crises of accumulation in the history of capitalism, over accumulation crises, and then how were those resolved historically? And what's different today? And this basically rests on a historical theory and environmental history of imperialism that by political means, capital's agents have to go out and restore the cheapness of labor, food, energy and raw materials. Those four are the four cheaps. That allows for the over accumulation crisis to be resolved because, all things being equal, a significant reduction in the price of labor, food, energy and raw materials entails a higher rate of profit.

Jason W. Moore: 58:46

This is not me. For those who want to be true to Marx, this is what Marx says absolutely explicitly in Capital, volume 3. Nevertheless, the eco-socialist response to my work and this is my point in relation to your question has completely elided this element of my argument. And so people posture and say, oh well, more. This is what Matt Huber does, without ever showing why it actually matters. Like, oh more doesn't deal with ground rent. Well, ground rent is about the distribution of surplus value. It's not fundamentally a theory of addressing how capitalism overcomes its over accumulation crisis. So the short version of this is that we're living through the terminal over accumulation crisis of capitalism because there are no more sources of unpaid work, of food, energy, labor and raw materials that might help to resolve the crisis. Without some kind of higher synthesis around political ecology, political economic economy, the fate of the Earth, planetary socialism, we're doomed. We really are doomed, because we're doomed to class rule. I don't think we're doomed existentially, but we're doomed to continue class rule.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:01

Well, when we look at, say, this current like neo-progressivism, soft green stuff, whatever we might call the incoherent bullshit that we call biotonomics or whatever, we definitely see Because there's a lack of cheap goods, it seems like increasingly rents as commodities and not rents as rents. Not that they're separate from capital, not we're in some kind of neo-feudalism. I agree with Eugene Morozov that if you actually look at that, it doesn't really make that much sense. You have to have a very vulgar view of what's going on right now to really maintain that. But there is a sense in which a lot of what's being traded as commodities are themselves rent sources. That's why would that be the case? Well, because a lot of these other things are exhausted. I think that is highly dependent on class rule and a very state interventionist way even, which is the other reason why I think where did all the libertarians go? There's a reason why they went away, even on the right. I think that's what we're looking at and that's really concerning. It's not a good thing. That's kind of hard to articulate, even though I've been one of these people. I agree with you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:53

There might be times and on things of which you have to critique Marx himself, but you should admit that you're doing it. First and foremost, if there is a theory in Marx that actually handles this and you claim to be a Marxist or even a post-Marxist of some sort, you should be accepting of the theory that actually handles it given to you if it's actually explanatory. If it's not, then you should abandon it. It's been a whole lot of preemptive abandonment. Won't even admit that it's doing it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:28

That's the thing that really gets me. I don't mind when people admit when they're revising Marx because they're being honest. It's when people try to convince me that they're not that I get a little bit upset because it's just like no, we should stick with the plain reading of the text, etc. I guess that does bring me to a very hot debate these days, marxian-permetianism which is I've read Marx for now 15, 20 years and I have actually gone back and forth about how much I think it's in him, but it is definitely in later Marxist. Undeniably it seems to be coming back as a kind of orientation amongst not a small minority of Marxist. How do you think we deal with that?

Jason W. Moore: 1:03:35

Well, I think we could start by recognizing that there are two, at least two, prometheus there's a bourgeois Prometheus and a proletarian Prometheus. For Marx, the figure of Prometheus from, of course, gertha's famous novels at the end of the 18th century was the rebel, the trickster, the one who defied the gods, stole fire and delivered it to humankind to unleash their creativity and the forces of production, if you will, in a dynamic way. I fear that on the left, much of the debate since John Clark's famous critique of Marx in the late 1980s, which even John Clark said was overstated, has really attached a bourgeois conception of Prometheus to Marx or to or also to, I think, quite uncritically to socialist projects, especially to the Soviet Union, where there's a kind of metaphysical bourgeois Prometheanism attached to the Soviets, as if they were interested in the domination of nature for the sake of the domination of nature. I think that's entirely false. I think that the history of the Soviet Union around science, natural science and ecology, and even conservationism, is considerably more mixed than most want to have it. Salvador Engel de Morro's fine book Social Estates and the Environment is instructive and useful on that matter. I think that what's happened because of the weakness of the left is precisely as you indicated. There's a polarization between those who insist on an abstract and, I think, essentially bourgeois Prometheanism against, and then those who react against it to say, well, we need to all live, simply so that others may live. Both are bourgeois or petty bourgeois sensibilities, unless we ground them in history.

Jason W. Moore: 1:05:48

I don't have a beef around some specific questions that are associated with accelerationists like Nick Serinocek, who I find to be a very bright guy and actually much more open than his critics would often have him. Some things, yeah, some things need and can be automated, but many things cannot. Many things around social reproduction can and should not be automated. Care for children, gardening and agriculture, yes, we can use machines for various elements, but much of life as critics of capitalist automation like Benanov and Jason Smith have recently made much of life cannot and should not be automated and capitalism is not likely to automate those either.

Jason W. Moore: 1:06:34

So I think again, we need to return to elements of both, say, agroecology, peer-to-peer learning. Where there are, the productive forces in agriculture can be unleashed in ways that do not entail capitalist monocultures, the hypertoxification of fields, all the rest. I think also that in some cases we do need to find a way out of the long-term capitalist stagnation in technology which has been in place since the 1970s really. So a socialist project would need to reimagine what kinds of technological innovation are really necessary to adapt to to mitigate the climate crisis in the interest of, broadly speaking, peasant and working class power and well-being. I don't know if that goes far enough and what you're looking for, but that's a start.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:35

Yeah, no, it's definitely a start. I'm thinking about the utterly mixed nature of what goes on in the Soviet Union. My own journey on that was initially believing a lot of the Soviet Promethean environmental destruction arguments and then actually studying what they did and realizing, well, sometimes it was true and sometimes it wasn't, and it was never just for its own sake. It was a lot of failure and a lot of accidental like yes, there were accidental environmental catastrophes, no denying that. But the idea that it was just pure Promethean absorption a lot of that comes out of just anti-communist rhetoric was like oh well, capitalism will regulate the environment better because of the natural resource allocation through markets. Yeah, I know very few people who would argue that today, but that that is the backdrop of a lot of those critiques of the Soviet Union. And yes, there were like yes, of course there were huge failures and there were industrial masses, but there's also real advances made on unclean energy, on ecology. It wasn't like the Soviets didn't care about it, and we definitely see that with China today. I mean, even if it's for practical reasons, just for maintaining a standard of living that could maintain the current Chinese quote middle class unquote and not turn their air black. They have been the forefront of green technology and right now, like, for example, they're the only people making a affordable electric car. It's not affordable in the US because of tariffs, but like it's it's, you know, all over Europe, etc. And what is the capitalist world doing about that? Well, you're seeing a lot of places who have traditionally not had tariffs on these kinds of things for keeping their even keeping the Paris Agreement commitments up, start to talk about tariffing that to for their own domestic industries in the ways the price of you keep the price of electric vehicles up, which you know has its own problems. But I think that's important. I like your distinction on the two kinds of Prometheanism, because one of my, you know we talked about this in your, your, your, your bad fetish and bad fetish out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:19

But I have found the whole growth degrowth conversation be like I didn't know what you mean, like like yes, for example, population stabilization probably will happen. I think it's going to happen, naturally. Frankly, you know, even in the socialist world, I don't think anyone's going to need to pass laws about it. It just seems to be the way things kind of tend out with educating women and making the survivability of children more viable, so you don't need to. You know, have as many as you can. So so on that, that front, I'm not really worried.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:00

Plus, you know, I am a believer that basically most of this what's called overpopulation is actually a concentration of population between town and country leading to problems. It's not actually overpopulation. Nor do nor do I think we'd have to destroy a massive amount of of environment to deal with that. I just don't. I don't believe that at all. And nor do I think we have to do the James Howard concert thing and pretend we have to go back to the 17th century to handle that either, because that's ridiculous.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:39

So the whole debate just seems ludicrous to me, particularly when we're talking about like growth in terms of GDP, because I'm like, well, gdp growth, just on a kind of basic level, is actually dependent upon high levels of disposability. Aka what, in classical Marxist terms, getting rid of dead labor by by, by, planned obsolescence, which you know, you could imagine a very rich society that I don't know makes shit to last, and that would. That would actually hurt GDP growth, but it wouldn't hurt the proletariat, it wouldn't hurt a society that was measuring that in different ways. I mean, that's just, you know that's just a way to keep profitability up. And if you're, if you, if you don't need that and you're concerned about that, then then then it's not a problem. So so talking about growth in this way at all just becomes like a distraction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:44

And I tend to agree with you. What do you make of this coming turn towards? I mean even even implied that there's a strong Malthusian undercurrent that's kind of come back in but not through like the like. Everybody realizes a lot of the population bomb stuff is why I say everybody. Most people realize that a lot of the population bomb stuff is explicitly racist, even like liberal progressives never touch Marxism in their life, will occasionally point that out about that book. But the you are right that there's was kind of a naturalization of materials that kind of recapitulates this through other means, so we don't have to be as direct about it.

Jason W. Moore: 1:13:29

But it was recoded in terms of consumption.

Jason W. Moore: 1:13:36

Why do you take the same sort of dynamic of the overpopulation models and you simply plug them into through this iPad model, cooked up by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, of impact equals population times, affluence times, technology?

Jason W. Moore: 1:13:53

You just change, change the figures for each of those variables, but it's the same neo Malthusian idea and it's a way of, through consumption, of generalizing the natural law responsibility of everyone, albeit in an individual way, for the climate crisis.

Jason W. Moore: 1:14:16

So when people, even when people, talk about consumer capitalism, there's still essentially that's neo Malthusianism for respectable company and the whole, the whole Anthropocene framework is very much still premised on populationism and indeed the, the crucial metaphor they use I'm talking about specifically the raft of articles by Will Steffen and his colleagues right around the year 2000, 2011. The term they use is the human enterprise, which sort of conjures up images of the Star Trek enterprise and all of that. It is, in fact, a phrase first deployed by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, and so there's a signaling to that that that, in fact, the whole Anthropocene imaginary is essentially a retrofitted version of spaceship Earth from the 60s and 70s, and so you're right that there's a sense in which to talk nakedly about population is really considered out of bounds. It's smuggled in in other ways, and yet the the paradox is, precisely, as you indicate, that there is a long term population stabilization and indeed we're seeing serious declines in life expectancy in places like the United States.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:43

Yeah, but I mean this has been my big push lately is like let's talk about working class life expectancy, drop that the? Yeah, there's been, there's been a slight equalization between people of color and white people, because white people are dying, not because people are living longer, like and and this is not really been. The does seem like the left has actually avoided this topic for reasons that actually I don't really understand.

Jason W. Moore: 1:16:17

It's I think it has to do with the pandemic and the the left's capitulation to the biosecurity state.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:25

Let's talk about that.

Jason W. Moore: 1:16:28

Now we'll really stir the pie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:30

Yeah, so.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:34

So what do you make of the like, what like?

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:36

When you say that, what do you mean? Because, because there is a kind of left vaccine truforism, for example, that I that I'm not on board with, but I do vaguely feel that there was a shift during the left that just started repeating the biosecurity state stuff I mean the CDC and specific verbatim and being highly selective about when they pointed out when it was being politicized or not, and that led to also people like taking the what we might call, you know, the biosecurity apparatus is statements as the statement of the scientific consensus, both in critiquing it. So now you know, we're critiquing science because we're critiquing what the CDC said, which is a vast misunderstanding, and I'm no leftist to do that. And yet also, the other thing is like, oh, we're supporting the science by supporting what the CDC and NHI say, and I've been like those are political institutions, bro, like that's not, those are not. You can't cleanly as say that they represent the scientific consensus of either the world or even the United States. So what do you think is going on there?

Jason W. Moore: 1:17:56

In the post war era there were new left theorists like you're going to Habermas, who talked about something that he called the scientization of politics, and he was absolutely right. It wasn't just about domestic politics, it was also about the American construction of a global scientific apparatus that involved, amongst other things, the whole Green Revolution, botanical research system, demography as a social science, all the rest of it. So there's a huge scientific infrastructure of imperialism coming out of the American reconstruction of the world and then, of course, within advanced capitalist societies. People like Habermas, and before him Markuz, identified the increasing rationalization and scientization of politics, essentially creating anti politics machines where the contentious, messy processes of a democratic society would be really sort of cleansed of those unruly tendencies and governed according to good science or the best science or scientific rationality in the uppercase S and R. And I think that we saw that really on steroids during the pandemic and I think that we see this also with the invocations of the climate emergency. It's not to say that there isn't a significant and meaningful climate shift ongoing. There is. It is catastrophic for life, for many life forms on this planet. But it is not a religion, right? It is not dogma, or it has become a religion and dogma and in fact, as you indicated, there are significant differences amongst scientists.

Jason W. Moore: 1:19:34

We're seeing this in the aftermath of the, the pandemic, both with the spread of the lockdowns, which now appear increasingly questionable the source of the, the virus itself, and the safety of the vaccines, which are not really vaccines in the way that polio is a vaccine right and the, the incidence of vaccine injury is quite extraordinary. Early on in the process, the Nordic countries said, for men under the age of 30, no, no vaccines if they're otherwise healthy. Right, and it's, it is. I'm not anti vax, I've been vaxed. You know, people who are at risk with comorbidity should get get vaccinated. None of this discounts those insights, but the point is that it was totally ideologized in the way that you indicated, where scientific research to the contrary of the CDC was actively suppressed. People were censored and so there's become a widespread popular embrace of censorship on social media, on YouTube and elsewhere, and so there are, you know, real issues that need to be addressed that were just totally suppressed ideologically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:00

And I agree with actually all those statements. In fact, I would go on to say that like one of the things that was super frustrating about about all this was the left response was so trusting of the state and that, while the efficacy of the vaccines is is not terrible from what I tell from from reading it, it was oversold and like when you look at the risk factor for for people under 20. Getting COVID versus people, that versus people above that it's. It's about Neil in some cases, maybe the the comorbidities of the vaccine or higher with younger people, particularly of like heart swelling and stuff like that. And yet what I'll be told when I talk about that is like, oh well, there's all these unreported youth you've covered deaths and I'm like, can you prove it?

Jason W. Moore: 1:22:19

We're still waiting for those to be reported.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:23

What do you what I mean? Yes, there's a lot of excess deaths right now.

Jason W. Moore: 1:22:27

There are, but I A lot of those are not being claimed to be covered by anybody, so I mean the demography is still very much up in the air, and there were many people who were admitted to hospitals and, with other conditions, had COVID. Those are people who died with COVID. Now, I'm not trying to underestimate the significant and horrific toll that many, many people experienced, including me and my family, where it was a terrifying moment. I think the the point, however, that you and I are raising is that we need a critical sensibility about the claims of big pharma and the FDA and the CDC and the extent of agency capture, which is extraordinary, as the left has made clear for many years. Respective civil liberties. All of these were, all of these critical sensibilities were thrown out the window.

Jason W. Moore: 1:23:28

Now, the connection to our conversation as a whole, of course, is that the same emergency politics and vote during the pandemic are, and will be, on a greater scale, invoked around the climate emergency, and so we need to raise very, very serious questions about this that, in a lot of ways, the ruling classes of the world are preparing for how to maintain their rule in the planetary inferno and whose rule can survive, and whether or not the Wall Street, white House, davis condominium can Pentagon Alliance can win the day.

Jason W. Moore: 1:24:10

I think it's quite doubtful. They've lost the global south. There's a looming conflict with Belt and Road and the global south, but these politics of what I call good science are going to be fundamental to how to realize actual climate justice. We cannot any longer be captive to this climate emergency rhetoric, which is always a state of emergency. Rhetoric always favors the ruling classes, and we saw that during the pandemic, which, by the way, was the moment of the greatest and most rapid upward transfer of wealth and American history, and so many of the people on the left forget that as well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:51

Now that's. That is something that's been in the back of my mind this whole time was how much, how many resources were grabbed, how much capital was? I mean a lot of the capital which is created. But but if you look at who's going to be paying through austerity in the next decade and how, even the small mitigations of that austerity, like the anemic student debt forgiveness program, which which I've always think was somewhat set up to fail because like actual structural fixes to the, to the student loan fiction, even from a capitalist point of view, were not discussed, like okay, let's just cap the interest at 1% or something like that, like, like that wasn't. No one's ever put that even on the table, which tells me it was never really serious.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:47

And, and you know, we've seen a lot of like. We've seen a lot of Democrats doing weird, weird double speak on both crime and emergency but also claiming like fairly anemic responses, like the, the green development stuff in the inflation reduction act, or like massive programs even though they don't even meet, and I guess they are historically big compared to what have been done privately, but they don't even meet the Paris Accord commitment. So it's like who are you fooling here? I, but similarly with the, with the discourse around COVID, where fear of crankery and yes, there was a lot of crankery, I'm not like, I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of anti, bad conspiracy theorists, that there's a lot of, there's a lot of nuttiness but fear of that was used to shut down discussions of anything, including maybe, for example, under counting COVID deaths, that during during the Biden administration's first year, you know there's all kinds of stuff that was potentially censored and people didn't really deal with our, like the CDC just deciding like well, you know that stuff, we said about 14 days, let's move it five. Like okay, that was clearly politicized, but also I haven't seen it much discussed.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:19

So you're right, there was a biosecurity state acceptance during this time period and talking about it has been seen as being making concessions to the right, which I don't believe it is. I'm like, no, you know there's, there's a whole lot of, there's been a whole lot of shenanigans here and what I? What worries me about it? I guess to some degree, whatever I'm talking about it so carefully right here is that there is a tendency that when you censor stuff like that and you're like, well, the left narrative is the state's narrative, that people who are critical, you know, of the CDC and NHI's discussion of this, then do go to the right, because they're the only people talking about this right and that that's something that we should be really concerned about. I mean, like you know, mitigation discussions beyond masking or whatever, and like I'm not, I'm not a man, I'm not here either was was totally ineffective.

Jason W. Moore: 1:28:24

I mean, if we're talking paper mass right, paper mass, totally ineffective.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:28

No, yeah, but you needed, you needed mass manufacturer of KN 95. And not like, what was the buy it in when they finally did it? We're going to give you one, why? It's just like, okay, and there are complications to that too. So like like I'm not Again, I'm not anti mask, I'm not anti masker. However, other mass mitigation stuff, like really fixing our ventilation systems, stuff like that, they were never on the table and instead we talked about, oh, you know, building ventilators and stuff that like largely don't work. So, so that's, that's crucial. And you know the administration that the Biden administration actually did, and I think you know maybe I'll get pushed back on this, but they did overstate the transmission effect, efficacy of the vaccine.

Jason W. Moore: 1:29:37

Well, the line changed from month to month as well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:41

Right and so and people say, oh, the science changed. I'm like they were making declarations before they knew what the science said. Right, like, that's not the science changing. That is like pretending you have confidence, you don't have. And and, yeah, you're right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:00

One thing I have thought about about, you know, the climate, emergency stuff is I have pointed out that that emergencies are necessarily conservatizing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:11

This is like my, this is what I push back on, like collapse acceleration, as to like, oh, if we push everything, we'll get socialism in the, in the, in the outcome. And I've always been like that's a disastrous way of thinking because, one, historically, actually, when we get the most reactionary regimes is when you try to do that shit. And two, I think it fundamentally doesn't understand human reaction because, like in those scenarios, it is very easy to convince people that their immediate interests need to be suppressed for long term interest. All those long term interests tend to be status quo interest. So shut the fuck up, right, like that is to be how that gets played out, right? And if anything, I want to ask your opinion on this what do you make of all the the quote Marxist concessions to the Biden administration? Because there's a whole lot of Marxist, who have been very quiet on criticizing the Biden administration in ways that they were not on criticizing, say, the Obama administration. What do you think is driving that as a part of this whole general capitulation?

Jason W. Moore: 1:31:34

are. I don't know. I mean who. Who are you thinking of?

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:37

if you don't mind naming a name, Well, dylan Riley and and Robert Brenner, for example, they do critique Biden, but it's pretty mild.

Jason W. Moore: 1:31:50

I think that there are a lot of professors, even left wing professors, who saw Trump as the coming of fascism, and my reading is very different. The Trump is indeed a classic American case of a right wing nationalist, which also explains his right wing anti imperialism, incidentally, and that centrist liberalism in the present conjuncture brings forth I don't want to say fascism, but a lot more of a techno dystopian surveillance state capitalism than what was possible before, that the. And this is revealed not just in the biosecurity state but I think in a proliferation of other measures that we're seeing not just in the US but all around the world. I mean, we see people like Nigel Farage in the UK being debanked and yes, he's terrible, he has terrible politics. A cognitive version of that, justin Trudeau invoking anti terror legislation to debank the truckers in their protests that yes, these are right wing elements, but everybody knows that the left will be high on the docket for the next round.

Jason W. Moore: 1:33:07

So I think that there was a hangover from Trump that a lot of leftists in the Academy saw Trump as significantly, qualitatively worse than somebody like Hillary Clinton. I think that's fair to say, and they were sort of freaked out about it. I just don't share that assessment. In fact I thought if you lived anywhere in the world outside the United States, especially in the global south, you were probably much happier with Trump than with Clinton, who was the architect of various war crimes, foremost among them the destruction of Libya. So I think again, this speaks back to the centrality of imperialism and anti imperialist critique and in some people's response, this is actually.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:52

This actually brings up an interesting problem. It doesn't get framed in the terms of eco socialism, that much, but it's something I think we should talk about, which is there is an actual right wing anti imperialism. Yeah, it's a real thing, that's right. It's often incoherent and with someone like Trump, you can have both like that right wing anti imperialism and broad gestures towards neo conservative policies in the same person at the same time, and so, when you know, when you talk about someone like Trump, it's, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:26

It's hard to parse, but one of the things that I pointed out, the people in 2016 because I was in Egypt at the time and I was like, look, my elite educated students, who all speak English and watch Western media, are all highly anti Trump, even though they're from Egypt and Yemen and etc. But the average person on the street in Egypt Until he declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, which happened after I left but they, they were pretty supportive of Trump, believe it or not, and they were. They were supportive of Trump along the lines of Look, we trusted Obama and then he ended up being the same kind of shill and also we couldn't figure out Even how he was dealing with our politics, like he was interfering with our politics, but seem to be playing both sides and the average Egyptian knew that right and, and you know that led to Very anti-American sentiment. And when I say anti-American sentiment, I also am very specific, because one of the things I've experienced is like European anti-Americanism tends to be at every American. When I've been in the developing world, anti-americanism isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my government. Yeah, um, for the most part, I've always found that interesting because it's just like when I'm in Europe's like oh, no, that you know they think I'm an uncouth barbarian. And then when I am in Like Mexico or Egypt, places where I've lived it's like no, your government is, is the uncouth barbarian, and we know you don't really control that, and I think that's an interesting difference. I don't know what. I have no real theory as to why that is, but, but it was interesting trying to explain that to people in it in liberal circles and left circles back home in 2016, when I was like the vast majority of people out here either don't care, are they mildly supportive of Trump, not because they trust him or think he's gonna be good, but because they think like, well, he's gonna be honest, then he's probably slightly less likely to blow people up and we know we, we know where he actually stands right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:57

And At the time in 2016, my, my, my initial response to the Trump election was a Lot of people are gonna be crazy, but I don't know that matters that much, and I think that shocked a lot of people. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't like I didn't predict his win. I'm not, I'm not gonna claim that, although I did think it was a possibility and but, but one of the things I've been pointing out, the people in the last yeah, and I'm not one of the people think the left should like, oh, we should go like Maga communism or something Patently ridiculous like that, like that's not. That's not at all what I'm advocating for. But I do think we have to ask ourselves some serious questions.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:37

When we're like, when we are in a cul-de-sac where we'll do anything to support the Democratic Party, even For even if you thought Parliamentary socialism was possible, putting yourself in a position where your primary job is to defend one of the two bourgeois parties seems Absurd as far as like, even from the parliamentary viewpoints. Like, like well, if they know that you're gonna back them up no matter what they do and you'll never even sit out. Then what do you have as leverage? Nothing, right, nothing at all. And that's also gonna be true on climate policy and stuff too. Guys, like that's not just going to be, like you're going to get, you know the word, although I do remember being very frustrated in, say, a 2021 when, like the Democrats, the one thing they wouldn't budge on was like increased carbon taxes, and I'm like why are you always aimed at making the reforms hit the poor and be unpopular?

Jason W. Moore: 1:38:45

Well, because they hate the poor and working class and they don't give a shit. I mean the and the data is, is you know, out there for decades. I think maybe one of the crucial Nodes of discussion here is the relationship between imperialism and the climate crisis. The climate policy and foreign policy are dialectically joined. Unfortunately, nobody in the environmentalist movement shares that opinion and they come by it honestly because the environmentalist movement was born in the Vietnam War as a kind of wedge issue to divide the anti-war left from Liberal professionals and young, young liberal professionals especially. People forget this.

Jason W. Moore: 1:39:28

But a week after the first Earth Day in, on April 22nd 1970, one week To the day after that, nixon orders the South Vietnamese Army and the US Army and Air Force into the horrific bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos. That sets of motion most famously the Kent State and Jackson State killings Right afterwards and the environmentalists did nothing. And the environmentalists in the United States have always been handmade in stampire. I Cannot recall, except maybe a Greenpeace organization. Greenpeace has its One or maybe both feet planted in the anti-nuke movement, which is very, very different Political ecosystem from, say, the Sierra Club.

Jason W. Moore: 1:40:11

The big greens never mobilized against any major war that the United States was undertaking and this is a point I make about the Anthropocene discourse all the time that Since 1999, the United States has conducted fully one-third of its over 500 foreign military interventions. So, of all those that have occurred since 1776 this is from the military interventions project at Tufts University one-third of all its interventions have occurred since 1991. The overlap with this liberal climate crisis hand-wringing is unavoidable, and so we need to begin to ask some very hard questions about these climate science researchers, climate social scientists, who have said nothing about America's forever wars and imperialism, and and it's not to blame them I believe they are absolutely sincere, and we need to bring pressure to bear on these, these people who form expert opinion About the relationship between America's forever wars it's bloated military industrial complex and the climate crisis.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:29

I Think that's a. That's a. That's a great point, particularly when you consider how much pollution that the the US military does just buy.

Jason W. Moore: 1:41:39

It's not and liberals are willing to do that. So netta crawford, who teaches at the road of paper for Brown University I forget where she teaches wrote this piece, which ends and yet what? What these Pieces never end up saying they never end up connecting the dots that the 800 plus military bases, the special forces operations in three quarters of the world's countries are operating to Maintain and reproduce the climate. Business as usual. So it's not just what they're emitting, but it's the whole. They're the protection racket for the whole climate crisis apparatus. I Mean people forget.

Jason W. Moore: 1:42:21

I mean, really, this is that you know the paraphrase of Mao that economic power grows from the barrel of a gun. And Again, many of these social Democrats and left Ecosocialists are not willing to touch these questions of the ongoing use of force as a permanent weapon. Rosa Luxemburg like to say that in the history of capitalism, that's absolutely what's there. And I think that as the climate crisis deepens, we are likely to see an intensification of the permanent war strategy on the part of a euro-american Condominium, maybe with the Japanese in play as well, and, of course, all the saber rattling and encirclement that goes in the direction of China.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:04

Which we've definitely seen it bipartisan increase up. I mean there is very recently a kind of it seems like the Biden administration is kind of like, well, we have to dial it back a tad because we don't actually want a full-on war, but just a tad, and yeah, that's what. That's the kind of stuff where I think we have to really be careful right now, because I'm waiting for that to be framed in a green it has not yet, but I'm waiting for that to be framed in a green Environment. And and you're right to point this out, jason that there's this huge underplaying of the role of the military in US society. Because since the 1970s, or even actually since more recently, I Was talking to someone about the poverty draft and like, well, that's because liberals just aren't keeping up yeah, you know there's current leftist like there's never been a poverty draft. Yes, there was. It's just it all was before 2006 and it was also More sneaky than you think. It wasn't just people did tied into policy, it was like most of the red, the kind of mid-size red state Economy, was actually totally tied into the military apparatus and that went away with it, with it being neoliberalized, actually doing the. The Iraq, the second Iraq war, which I think has been under understood, because it was very stealth and the move to drones and all that was very much part of that and that was maintained under Obama. So there was no real Democratic eye on this either.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:45

And I Think that we have to look at that role because because of that it means we don't see how much of a role the military plays in US society because that, you know it, not everyone is obviously Directly involved in it. But, as I've been pointing out, like there's hardly a piece of primary science research in this country that doesn't touch DARPA, like In stuff like that, like it's, like it's almost like the snake in, like it really is like what you can't talk about, because if you talked about it, like like you'd have to really deal with all these other problems that that are why, for example, you're never gonna get the quote squad to like vote against military funding because it would even collapse their Social remediation projects and whatever. But in and in that way, there is a real way in which it is tied to imperialism that a lot of people do not want to look at. I don't think I don't think a US socialist project has to be imperialist. That's not what I'm saying. Or that we should totally abandon the first world proletariat or whatever. I think that's ridiculous but that we do have to look at that. Like we do have to look at how many of these Programs are based on programs that require, say, us dollar hegemony. It's nothing else.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:13

And and US dollar hegemony is directly tied into to the military, like when people you know in mp3 is like, oh, there's ideological reasons why people, you know People, are pegging their stuff to doll. I'm like, is it or do they have to buy us stuff? And if they don't buy you a stuff you have, gumboats might be in their parbers. I don't really know. This is not obvious to you. So it's, it's an interesting conundrum and I think right now it's a particularly complicated conundrum because it you brought up the, the Russia Ukraine war, and that has.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:55

My views on that are complicated, but I think it that really has been a way for the, the US military industrial complex, to like Keep its funding going and keep itself active without the downside of actually being directly in a war, which is which has become vastly unpopular, even on the right these days. So, and you know, if you don't think that's gonna have an environmental toll. I don't know what you're on, but I think you're absolutely right about that. But it's very, it's very hidden from the average person now in a way that you know, and I think in a lot of the beginning of the 20th century and and maybe even Up until like the 1980s, it wasn't hidden and so it makes it very easy for social democrats to just ignore it. Okay, right, and I do think you're also right that this emergency mentality is going to be used.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:00

I Think about the climate Leviathan book and, and my, I Actually sort of think we're not gonna get climate Leviathan. I think we're probably gonna get climate, the climate Bohemian section, which is just like like we'll get some green concessions, but it's gonna be in terms of international competition and it's gonna be bad. But but Even the climate Leviathan stuff, I don't think people are going to To like what they get and it's going to be used to justify the rule of the people who are currently in power. I think that's absolutely true.

Jason W. Moore: 1:48:39

Well, we need pick your favorite climate now climate Castro, climate Lenin. My comrades and I often talk about climate Castro, where you reference methodological nationalism. Well, what was? What was Cuban socialism's orientation to the national struggle? It understood that it lived or died on international solidarity, and so sometimes there were mistakes Ethiopia, congo but also sometimes there were profound victories the intervention in Angola and the eventual defeat of South African apartheid, the support for Nicaragua, the support for Venezuela. But there are lessons of internationalism that can be brought to bear, in contrast to my colleagues the geographers Wayne Wright and man who wrote climate Leviathan, who, frankly, I just dismissed climate now in a very, very which doesn't even really relate to what now is doing, and Just dismiss it. If there is a history from which to draw, it is precisely the linking, the internationalist solidarity of these national liberation projects, like the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, to provide a counterweight to American imperialism, and they paid the price for it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:59

Yeah, I mean well that. It brings up the elephant in the room, which you know. When we talk about the great tragedies of socialist history, I'm like the sign of Soviet split is probably the biggest one, because China, integrating with the West first developmental needs becomes the only way after that point, and also the Soviet Union has no one to work with. That it's of significant size and I mean it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:26

It definitely stalled things out in in Cuba and I am one of these, these people and I know I Been told that I'm soft on Stalinist for this, whatever the fact I call him Stalinist usually in the case that I'm not, but but the that I that I think the Cuban revolution is, like all the actually existing socialist revolutions, the Cuban ones, the easiest one to support, because it's, you know, like, because it was internationally oriented, because it's not ethnically, there's not like an ethnic homogenity, homogeneity emerged out of it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:58

Because it it's not say the Cuban revolution wasn't bloody, it was, but and it's not to say there wasn't mistakes, like how, like what you're talking Ethiopia, also Cuba took a long time to figure out how to handle the age crisis, but so did everybody. You know there were mistakes and I don't want to downplay that some of them, some of them, are really quite bad, but I I think that is like the primary model, like To look at us, like you want to look at a successful social estate that ends up that that doesn't do a whole lot of atrocity mongering or anything like that. You look at Cuba.

Jason W. Moore: 1:51:35

But, the. Soviets. The Soviets were not atrocity mongering either. I mean, there's I'm not sure what incident we can, we can dig into it, but Cuban Cuba is only there because of the Soviet Union, absolutely.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:46

No, I'm it, I'm a defensist. I tend to, I tend to push back on people who don't want to deal with, like the Yuzhoshina and stuff like that. People don't want to deal with the purges and some of the mess around preparing for the wars, because I think that's a context of a lot of that stuff. But I am not one of these people who like then, who goes like, oh, because of that and because of the, the excesses of Of the 1930s, that we should just throw the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. I think that's ridiculous, and I Do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:29

You think it was an overly military, militarized society and that limited it in ways that became a huge problem by the 1980s. But I don't think like that didn't happen because of of just bad faith. It happened because they were boxed in. And it happened because the German Revolution failed and it happened because the social Democrats increasingly moved right as opposed to like trying to make some concessions to the Bolsheviks and and healing that with rest, which was never healed, etc. I mean, those are, you know, those are all things that are that are super important.

Jason W. Moore: 1:53:08

I mean the whole point of Stalinism properly conceived.

Jason W. Moore: 1:53:11

So in in that period, let's say until his death, the whole point of Stalinism in the 30s, was to avoid counterrevolution and build a state, an economy, a military in a food system that would not crack under the hammer blows of German invasion.

Jason W. Moore: 1:53:30

And so that doesn't mean everything is excused, but it means that was its strategic world historical priority, to which everything else was sacrificed. And In the West, you know, leftist intellectuals love the oppressed as long as they don't win and as long as they don't build a State in a military that consists Consistence, that can sustain Defense against fascist invasion or imperialist invasion. And so I think a lot of this not in your case but in a lot of, a lot of people's minds, this issue is Entirely omitted that you build a food system with a hundred fifty thousand Collective farms, so the food system won't crack, whereas if you have four and a half million peasant households, it's completely different matter. You build an industry that won't crack, a state in an army that won't break, all of which happened, as we know, in in 1916 and 1917 under a far weaker military Intervention. People can't. I think this point can't be emphasized enough for those who don't know the history that the German invasion in June 1941 was the greatest military operation in human history, before or since.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:45

Yeah, I mean, and also like the Russian casualties in that were something like a hundred and twenty percent, I mean it's, it's, it's absurd what they paid for that I think. I think one of the things that we have to do as far as, like, when we confront I mean this is way beyond the scope of eco socialism in some degrees but when we confront, say, the USSR in the 1930s, I can't justify the Yishofchina, I can't. But I can put the context of what happened beyond just Stalin bad, and that's something we have to do because, yes, some of it is about personalities, some of it is about concessions and I do think an attempt to totally redeem Stalin is probably misguided too. But I definitely think that. But the context in which that happens, one of the things that I pointed out yeah, the purges are not like the purges taking so many people out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:54

That's not just like Stalin's machinations to kill all this former comrades, that's also like social forces being unleashed during this period of also rapid industrialization, where there's pent up violence and a need to both develop and control a nomenklatura and ethnic tensions or whatever that just spill out. And, yes, a socialist transition has to handle that. But my sort of like dire Marxist prediction of history is. I kind of think that it was somewhat inevitable once the German Revolution failed and the social democrats and the Bolsheviks basically refused to cooperate. Ever like it's to me that when people you know because I tend to be one of these people, even though I'm not an anti-Trotskyist I don't want to come out for that either, but I tend to be when people think, oh, if Trotsky had run, the Soviet Union would have been that way.

Jason W. Moore: 1:57:03

I'm like I don't know, man, the program was the same fucking program, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:07

I mean actually like he would have accelerated some things that were you talk about, like the deaths of agricultural collectivization. Well, the Bakon period was nicer about that than Trotsky would have been explicitly like oh yeah. So I've always just found that to be kind of a cope and also to misunderstand the nature of like the social forces and so, and similarly with like, when we talk about Mao, I always point out that like like there. Yes, there are massive deaths in the transition, particularly in the Great Leap Forward.

Jason W. Moore: 1:58:00

However, Great Leap, overstated as well by the demographers who studied that originally.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:11

Oh yeah. However, I just want to be like the average life increase went up during the Great Leap Forward, like life expectancy went up by like 10 years during the Great Leap Forward. So while it was bad, it was actually still an improvement to the prior conditions.

Jason W. Moore: 1:58:34

Look, I think I think this speaks to the point of a lot of what we've been going over that as socialists, we need to draw a sober balance sheet, not an ideologically charged one and, yes, there's no escape from ideology and all this but we need to draw sober balance sheets and to draw lessons, negative and positive, from the experiences of state socialism.

Jason W. Moore: 1:58:59

That's going to be fundamental as we try to move forward in envisioning a socialist strategy. The other part is that I think most of the eco left has, frankly, no sense and no real interest in dealing with the excruciating ethical, political, moral choices around violence and policy that will be. Everyone will be called socialist, capitalist, fascist, whatever everybody will be called to make in the era of the climate crisis. And there is almost an inability or, right now, let's call it an unwillingness, because I think the ability is there to deal with these excruciatingly painful, difficult situations in which, as you said earlier, there are bad situations in which we have to make choices, and they may not be equally bad, but they will be differentially bad, and we need to be able to make the best choice for moving forward, to then get to a good situation from a very bad one.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:03

Yeah, I think I was reminded of a quote where, where Marx talks about we don't lie to the population, we tell them they'll be 50, at least 50 years of civil wars and whatever to the transition. And I and there's a move away from that even in the second national being honest about what that meant. I mean, you know, when Ingalls talked about the parliamentary road socialism, he also, like it, like admitted, like you're going to be in a, you're going to be even if you win, you're going to be in a defensive civil war almost immediately. And so what comes to these things now? I think there's two things. One is we've lived through a period in the imperial core asterisk of seeming peace where, like, most of the violence is hidden from us and since most of us don't serve in the military or whatnot, we have not been exposed to it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:01

It was eye opening for me to travel the world during the, during, like the Syria, the Syrian civil war, etc. And during the cartel wars in Latin America, to really see the cost of that which, you know, I am one of these people who think that that, like even stuff like the cartel wars are totally tied in the US imperialism and state capitulation to, to local state capitulation, to set imperialism, not to excuse like the lump and bourgeoisie or whatever either. I mean they're real, but it is to put it in in some kind of global context. There's a reason why, for example, when you talk about, like cartel war, violence, the, the so far from God, so close to the United States thing comes into to huge prominence. So there is, there is definitely that, and I think we have to. Like you know, I am one of those people who thinks that socialism ultimately will be stateless, but I'm also one of these people who totally admits that, like, you can't get there Without, without states.

Jason W. Moore: 2:02:18

Right now you have to deal with the special forces, the death squads, the Phoenix assassination programs, the drones, the bombers, the napalm, the chemical, biological warfare. There has to be a sober assessment of the history of how movements have dealt with those threats.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:37

Yeah, absolutely, and in the scale and technological capacity of those threats right now, we're at a scale that that's almost impossible to to deal with, which makes a lot of socialists refusing to deal with stuff like the military or what you know at all, you know, kind of irresponsible, put it nicely. And I think we have to be yeah, you have to be absolutely honest about that, and I do think your call for a sober balance sheet is important. I think we have to. The last thing we have to deal with is deal with the legacy of profound anti communism, and and in doing that, what I don't think we do is just inverted. I don't think you can just like, oh well, everything said by anti communist slides, because it isn't all, but we do have to be honest about it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:41

And when we're talking about, I don't know, the survival of humanity, for example, which I'm not sure, I am actually not sure we're actually at that kind of existential crisis, but I think we are at a potential for like well, in terms of nuclear war, we are, yes, that's true, actually, yeah, and with the climate crisis, I think we are we could be in for it for the developing world to have a massive population hit. I think we've already seen that with the way Pakistan has been handled, for example, and you know I don't want that blood on my hands. I just want to put that, I want to say that pretty, pretty clearly that that a socialism that doesn't deal with internationalism, even in the, even in ecological development, right now, it's effectively a socialism that is turning. It's turning its head to a handful, you know, being totally awash with blood, and I don't think it has to be that way and I think we yeah, I think it's going to be, I think it's gonna be hard, though I think it's going to be hard to break people out of that for a little while.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:00

And that's my immediate worry that, like to tie it back to something we were talking about earlier, I think in the immediate term, it looks like anti imperialism may be and right wing guys, and I don't think that's great, like I don't. I don't, I'm not one of these people who thinks like right wing anti imperialism is really even truly anti imperial, like the Monroe doctrine is still an imperial doctrine, but it is something that that seems to speak to the reality of the return to multi polarity or whatever that Agreed, yeah, liberals have known about for 20 years. I mean, fritz Ikari was talking about that shit in 2006, but has been totally ignored. You know anyway. Final points.

Jason W. Moore: 2:05:55

Well, I think I think I would return to my observation about the long history of climate crises and class society, including in the history of capitalism that moments of dramatically unfavorable climate change are also moments of real political possibility. And this was true for the 17th century climate crisis, which was a moment of profound social revolt. This was the era of the front in France, of the English Civil War. Cromwell cuts the head of the King of England and finds himself faced with the Communist army of levelers and diggers outside of London. And similarly, the age of maltice was the age of revolution, of the Haitian and French revolutions, the Irish revolt, a class revolt in the English countryside around the price of food and the capacity of enclosures. So there is a longer history of unfavorable climate. That is, yes, indeed, on the one hand, in an immediate and day to day sense, a moment of hardship for the vast majority. On the other hand, it tends to unravel the underlying conditions for ruling class power. That can't be forgotten. In fact, in the 20th century, the best parallel is the history of great world wars, which tended to unravel the history, the power of the great regimes as we've been talking about with the Soviet Union, china, many other places around the world and the great frenzy of decolonization after World War II. We want to keep in mind that these dynamics of destabilization are not to be feared. We must assess them, we must not be, as you say, sort of Pollyanna-ish about them.

Jason W. Moore: 2:07:50

The antidote to climate doom isn't a kind of Panglossian approach.

Jason W. Moore: 2:07:55

It is again to return to the real sober drawing of balance sheets so that we can discern, as Lenin would remind us, the weak links in the imperialist chains of power.

Jason W. Moore: 2:08:09

And I think on that basis we can actually be hopeful that we can resist the climate emergency rhetoric and try to pierce the veil of the dominant cosmology of man against nature, society and nature and the ways that people talk about those.

Jason W. Moore: 2:08:25

Those are cages for our imagination and the real dialectical and emancipatory and revolutionary possibilities were signaled I've been saying lately and writing about this at some length were signaled by Marx, who begins his critique of idealism with the critique of abstract man. Everybody forgets this, but it was the critique of man in general, a point that's made in the manifesto even and that the way to comprehend the revolutionary struggle is the dialectical unity of well, as Marx says in Capital, of the soil and the worker. That, to quote him from quote him, quoting Thomas Moonser the creatures too must go free. There is a sense that the liberation of the proletariat is also a liberation of life and that that is what the proletarian standpoint, the planetary proletarian standpoint, allows, I think an ecology of hope and liberation against the doomism of the ruling class, but also, unfortunately, of much of the climate left.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:34

That's a great point to end on. Thank you so much. Anything you'd like to plug, it's always feel weird as a communist.

Jason W. Moore: 2:09:40

Well, for those who are curious about any of this, you can go to my website. It's Jason W Moore, calm and it's all there. So I encourage you to go check it all out and verify, test challenge, all in the interest of a comradely reimagination of our crisis and the possibilities moving forward.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:03

And all right. Thank you so much.