Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Marx, De-Growth, and Climate Crisis: A Critical Analysis with Lee Phillips and Matt Huber
Can Marx help us navigate the climate crisis, or is de-growth socialism the answer? Join us for an in-depth discussion with Lee Phillips and Matt Huber as we unravel Kohei Saito's controversial interpretations of Marx's writings on natural limits and the metabolic rift which they began this piece for Jacobin. We challenge Saito's redefinitions of crisis theory and dissect whether Marx truly advocated for de-growth, or simply acknowledged environmental concerns within his broader economic theories. This episode promises to illuminate the oft-overlooked complexities of Marx's environmental views and their relevance today.
The episode deeply delves into the shifting class composition within the left, from the industrial labor strongholds of the 60s and 70s to the rise of middle-class intellectuals and knowledge workers in contemporary discourse. We analyze how this shift has allowed radical, yet impractical ideas to gain traction, and emphasize the need for a more inclusive and representative left. Our discussion highlights the practical insights of industrial labor, particularly in the context of decarbonization and environmental sustainability, offering a grounded perspective on these pressing issues.
We don't stop there. Our conversation also explores the intricate relationship between technology, social labor, and capitalism, critiquing extreme environmental proposals and advocating for the repurposing of existing technologies for a fairer, sustainable future. We delve into the controversial interpretations of Marx by figures like Negri and Saito, and debate the practicality of radical socialist solutions for climate change. Tune in for a thought-provoking episode that challenges conventional wisdom, from prison abolition to viable climate solutions, and promises to provide a historically informed approach to eco-socialism and environmentalism.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to VarnBlock and in our long series on eco-socialism I have Lee Phillips and Matt Huber here to talk about Kohei Saito's recent writings on de-growth socialism. We're going to be picking up the claims of saito. I have been going through karl marx's eco-socialism pretty much word for word over on patreon and I have found myself starting sympathetic and ending in screaming at the book.
Leigh Philips :That's a good way to put it. It starts really well.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, it starts like a good work of Marxology and then I think about 150 pages in the book Sato just asserts that Marx means the opposite of what he even said in the letter that he cited and things go on from there.
Matt Huber:Well, I mean, that's the prize winning book and from my perspective, I mean there's three books now and it's the most serious and it's almost entirely Marxological.
Matt Huber:Maybe the problem is the latter two books try to get into some political claims and prescriptions. But yeah, I mean, I think the main point of the book is that Marx started to take sort of natural limits seriously and I think he makes a pretty good case that Marx was starting to grapple with those limits, that Marx was starting to grapple with those limits. But he never mentions in that particular book that the limits that he was concerned with were of soil fertility and those limits were completely surpassed by the advent of nitrogen fertilizer, chemical fertilizer production a few decades after Marx died, which just like shot through all those limits that perhaps Marx was grappling with. Liebig certainly identified but, as we say in the article like came up with solutions to as well, or at least pointed to that we can solve these with fertilizers. But that seems to be the main point. It's much less sort of bold and ambitious a claim that Marx was a de-growther, it's just that he's starting to think about limits, right, it's a very different type of claim.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I read Sato's edited volume on Engels and some of his essays in there and I realized he starts talking about crisis theory but he reappropriates what the meaning of crisis theory is from economic cycle crisis and the business cycle into the ecological cycle. And when I saw that I was like there's no, you can't do that Seriously. That's, that's a, that's a total equivocation of the of the word crisis. So I find it interesting that he starts strong. I mean, the first book is based on maga 2 um research, or mega 2 research for those of you who don't know. Yeah, mega, um, I'm southern, all vowels are the same to me but um, uh, but anyway, um, the mega two research. But I have found I even that book. Um, I agree with you, it was. It was a pretty daunting and interesting work of marxist scholarship. But I, the central claim that the entirety of capital is really about soil erosion and productivity seems to be a stretch and we're off to the races from there.
Leigh Philips :Yeah, I mean a lot of this stuff. The Marxology is really weak in terms of its evidentiary basis, is really weak in terms of its evidentiary basis, you know. Even you know he's sort of extending or trying to extend John Bellamy, foster's and company's sort of work, trying, you know, claiming that Marx had a theory of metabolic rift and that itself is. Again that's another work that you know. Marx's ecology, john Belloncer, is one that starts up really well, but the evidentiary basis for these claims are very, very thin on the ground.
Leigh Philips :You know you've got a couple of footnotes in the third volume of Capital With Saito. You've got the Zasulich letter or like actually just one draft, the final draft. It was the final draft right Compared to this gargantuan canon of text both from Marx and classical Marxism that doesn't reject the progressive role of capitalism, that doesn't reject the need for that socialism would be unfettering the force of production that are imposed by capital. And so it's really frustrating to see how many people in the Marxist left have been sort of bamboozled by these texts, given the dearth of evidence there. People have not read extensively or they have read extensively and are just choosing to emphasize these very small tidbits of evidence, which could be also.
Matt Huber:In any case, could be read in other ways yeah, and I think in his main claim to that you're pointing out, derek, is that somehow metabolism became sort of like absolutely central to Marx's political economy as a whole, and that I think you know again, you can look in the notebooks Marx was clearly interested in the soil and the metabolism and what he framed as the metabolism, but you know it's clearly not the central category of capital and to his critique of political economy that's focused on value and surplus value and exploitation and accumulation I mean it's just as we put it in the piece. It becomes like metabolism all the way down, sort of that becomes the central part of the sort of big shift that that um Marx makes, uh, and towards being an ecological thinker. And it's just not clear. It's, it's so central from at least the the text.
Leigh Philips :So purely, purely anachronistic. There's, no, there's no understanding to anywhere near the extent that we have today of understanding of environmental challenges. Environmental problems it just it would be. It's. You have the limited beginnings of concerns about pollution.
Leigh Philips :The identification of the robbing of the soil from Jesus von Liebig is not incorrect with respect to nutrient depletion. But there's already a Marxist response to that that if there is a solution to that problem that is profitable, then capitalists will solve that problem. That is profitable, then capitalists will solve that problem. If a resolution of that problem is not profitable or even insufficiently profitable and this is sort of what Michał Zaworski and I put forward in People's Republic of Walmart and then where Christopher's sort of develops much, much further in his latest work, the Price is Wrong, then they won't develop that. This doesn't just go for environmental challenges, this goes for anything.
Leigh Philips :We could see exactly the same issue with the development of antimicrobial resistance, where antibiotics are no longer as effective as they used to be and we need to just develop new classes of antibiotic. But because for 40 years large pharmaceutical companies have largely got out of the business of new research and development and production deployment of new classes of antibiotic because it's insufficiently profitable compared to drugs for chronic diseases. They won't produce them, and that's not an environmental problem, that's an issue with pharmaceuticals. And so, problem after problem after problem that humanity faces, marxism already has an explanation as to why markets are insufficient in solving those problems. We don't need to invent a whole new sort of theory of metabolic rift. It's already there within commodity production.
C. Derick Varn:Well, I mean, in some ways it's a little bit frustrating because in the beginning of Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, sato uses this relatively obscure Japanese school of Marxism to argue that, um, you know, resource exhausted would be endemic to capital, and I'm like, well, duh, um, but that would also lead to other pressures. Um, that would correct for some of it, although ultimately there'd be a crisis. But the idea it doesn't, at least from even from that work. It doesn't actually make sense to me to go from that to one arguing that we need to throw Ingalls out of the Marxist canon, which is a very old move.
Leigh Philips :But yeah, yeah. Even John Bellamy Foster really doesn't like that.
Matt Huber:Yeah, his monthly press is the original publishers of Saito and Ingalls. John Bellamy Foster's brought up that Ingalls' early work on the condition of the working class in England is very ecological. It's very much about, like you know, pestilence and horrible conditions of water and waste. You know it's very. There's an ecological story to be told there.
Leigh Philips :Just to go back to what you were saying a second ago, derek, around that resource exhaustion is endemic to capitalism. Duh, I mean, I would disagree with that. I would say that resource exhaustion, if that is profitable, then that is what capital, in a particular sector, will continue to do. If they can solve that exhaustion and the solution is profitable, then they will do that. The problem is this understanding that it isn't just limited to questions around ecology, but there's a sort of widespread belief on the left that everything that capitalism does is bad, that there can be no progressive role to capitalism, whereas Marxism says no, it's not immoral, it's amoral. And so sometimes there will be things that in the course of capitalist production that are absolutely of benefit to humanity, so long as it's profitable, then that is the key. You could encapsulate our entire critique, basically, of this school of thought with that understanding. The capitalism is this Janus-faced, it's not purely villainous.
Matt Huber:I mean, I think Sorry, I think Lee and I have had conversations about this I think there are parts of capitalism that like particularly the anarchy of market allocation that just like it's just like out of our collective control. I think that is something that makes it very hard to kind of as we would like to plan our relationship with nature in a very rational way. So that sort of anarchy of the market's a real big problem. But but um, I also think I, you know the, as mark said, the kind of like inbred tendency to develop uh labor productivity and uh called relative surplus value, sort of um it sort of constantly and of constantly improving the labor productivity of technology does perhaps tend towards a certain constantly.
Matt Huber:If you couple that with the necessity of accumulation, you can sort of see there would be a ratcheting up of the material throughput, of um resource use through these internal dynamics of capitalism. But whether or not um, you know, that has uh ecological problems, has to do with what the energy inputs are and what the material inputs are and all that kind of stuff. But there are these kind of again, these sort of anarchic and sort of constantly revolutionizing the labor productivity that could lead to ecological problems, but I think it's again. Yeah, it's very amoral, I like that framing as well. And yeah, it's very amoral, I like that framing as well.
Leigh Philips :And the crucial thing there is not to respond to that problem by de-growing or imposing limits to growth net aggregate increase in production, but to democratize production and then leave it up to people ourselves to decide what new production is going to occur, what reduction in production is going to occur. It's just so much more complex a challenge that we face, rather than just the 1960s, 1970s Neo-Malthusian limits to growth thesis which historically at the time, thankfully almost uniformly, marxists were very, very critical of. The unfortunate thing is today that we don't seem to have as many people who should know their marks taking on these or repeating these sort of Neo-Malthusian claims of the 60s and 70s population bomb and the limits to growth report of a Romo that it's just a regurgitation of that, and we might want to ask what has changed with the class composition of the left since then that has led to this retreat from a classical Marxist analysis to a sort of yeah to this Neo-Malthusian perspective? We've got answers to that question as well, if you want to hear.
C. Derick Varn:Well, yeah, before we get into the specific arguments, what do you think has shifted the class composition of the left?
Leigh Philips :I think that in the 90s, I think we still haven't come to grips fundamentally with how thoroughgoing the victory the neoliberal victory, victory of the 1970s and 1980s over the working class and, crucially, working class institutions, uh was, um that there was a shattering of the left, um, the uh, the sort of the intellectuals within the left which had always historically been um, embedded primarily within trade unions and industrial unions, retreated to academia, to these new forms of enterprise called NGOs, non-governmental organizations and the media. There's nothing wrong per se with being a journalist or an academic. I'm a journalist, matt's an academic. The problem is when the bulk of the left is built out of that much more middle class. I don't want to use PMC Derek to articulate some fantastic critiques of that term, which I completely agree with, but it would be the same as if, for example, all of the left were or were primarily male, as in, you know, in a lot of trade union leadership in the 1950s, 1960s was the case and it there was, it was, it was perfectly fine for men, men in like feminist men within the trading movement and the left to say this is a problem, and I think the more professionals like myself and and matt it's, it's not hypocritical for us to say, point out like there's, the left should be much broader, much more representative of the whole of the class, um, um, than than just this small, more middle class um section. As a result of that um, there isn't the disciplining force of the bulk of the working class and intellectuals. Their greater flights of fancy are allowed to run freely and so we come up with crazy things like degrowth, communism and abolish the police and abolish prisons and things like that.
Leigh Philips :I think any time that the industrial labor does respond to these crazier positions of mandatory global veganism and degrowth and only having variable renewable energy like wind and solar, not much more expansive understanding that we need firm, clean electricity from nuclear, from geothermal, from hydroelectric and so on and so forth, when labor, particularly industrial labor that is literally in the cold face of these energy, transport and industrial systems, pushes back against these crazier demands, the response from this middle-classy, professional not managerial, but sometimes managerialial people that dominate the left discourse, the response from that is that these people are just business unionists, as opposed to what they really are, which is people who have a deep, both formal and tacit, understanding of those industrial systems and how best to decarbonize them how best to clean them up, and you have the most systems and how best to decarbonize them, how best to clean them up, and you have the most weight in society to be able to force changes in line with decarbonization and other environmental questions through their ability to withdraw their labor and collective bargaining. Sorry, matt.
Matt Huber:Yeah, I mean, and also during precisely this period we have seen the neoliberalism was an attack on the whole working class, but it was particularly in the global north, and attack on the industrial working class and you have processes of deindustrialization and just complete abandonment of that section of the working class, of that section of the working class, and that at the same time you have sort of the rise of, you know, the knowledge economy right, the what some call cognitive capitalism or sort of like the increasing preponderance of highly educated knowledge workers, who we now refer to as PMC or whatever. But they were the class of people that was kind of using credentials to kind of carve out advantages in the labor market that's being completely decimated through neoliberal kind of inequality. And so that class of knowledge workers became particularly invested in environmentalism, right, and a lot of environmentalism became about, you know, knowing the science and politics of kind of knowledge around, the science of collapse and insofar as, like in the 1970s, like the limits to growth report, was like the science is saying that we're about, you know, we're about to hit these limits, so like all this is converging on this kind of politics that really appeals to a knowledge working class, if you want to put it that way, and what constitutes this class too is that, as Lee was saying, they're separated materially from production. They're separated materially from production from, like the nitty gritty of not only industrial production but agriculture and energy and the whole kind of material system that you would say is actually causing a lot of these environmental problems, whether it be climate change or another. So from this kind of detached knowledge worker perspective it was it became very like obvious to kind of have this very anti-industrial politics, right. That's just we need to sort of shut down these whole systems and degrow all this stuff.
Matt Huber:And but you know, a lot of times these knowledge workers don't have really sophisticated technical understandings of how these systems of production work, how we could actually transition these systems of production work, how we could actually transition these systems and production into ways that could both make them more environmentally sound but also like continue to provision humanity's needs, right, and and and.
Matt Huber:So you get a lot of these fantasies of kind of we can just like localize agriculture, and everything will be fine, right. Or or, as Lee said, we can just like build a hundred percent solar andize agriculture, and everything will be fine, right. Or or, as lee said we can just like build 100 solar and wind power and it will just be fine, and some some, uh, there's this act, I think, anthropologist named david hughes, who said, you know, we should just align our lives with the intermittency of solar and wind power and allow there should be blackouts, just intermittently, because we have to solve climate change and and that's sort of seen as a, so there's just like complete detachment from the engineering, technical systems of production. That, again, you know, marxism was always about, like material production, how the working class is going to seize it and, uh, that, uh, that's just not the. The class of knowledge workers that became the protagonist of environmentalism are not embedded in those material systems and so their politics is, I think, distorted for that reason in a lot of ways.
Leigh Philips :And so this is just one last Sorry, derek. I just wanted to add very quickly, sorry, just one last sorry, derek, but that stratification is crucially about the relations to the means of production, not wealth, not the liberal class analysis or class critique, which is that some people are wealthier than other people, and therefore this is where we get the sort of like Saito's claim that workers in the global north live quote extravagant lifestyles, or this book that's just come out from Verso to, I think, german academics claiming that we're all culpable within the imperial mode of living, the imperial mode of living. Ultimately, these critiques are much more liberal, wealth-based critiques about the stratification within the global working class, rather than a critique based around relations to production.
C. Derick Varn:Well, this actually is related to a question I was going to ask. This kind of politics is not new. We had it in the 60s and 70s with the liberal Paul Ehrlich, which was very nasty, almost explicitly racialist. Um, then in the eighties and nineties and a little bit in the early aughts, you had the advent of primitivism, john Sarazin world and um, and at least you can get those guys to admit that their politics required a 99.9% human die-off. You know, like basically that, to return to hunter-gatherer, I mean, saracen goes so far in one essay as to admit you might have to somehow evolutionarily lobotomize humans so they don't have abstract thought anymore, so they don't reinvent technology, oh jeez, so they don't have abstract thought anymore.
Leigh Philips :So they don't reinvent technology, oh jeez.
C. Derick Varn:But when I encountered radicalism in the late 90s, early aughts, that was what I encountered first.
Leigh Philips :Me too, yeah, yeah.
C. Derick Varn:Daniel Quinn Derek Jensen. Oh my God.
Matt Huber:Daniel Quinn and Derek Jensen were like my. They were like my intro to politics.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean we're at the right age.
Leigh Philips :Oh my God, I was an Earth-first-er, all that stuff.
C. Derick Varn:So the question that I have about this is one of the things that makes degrowth a little different is that it doesn't say we're going to be in absolute primitive conditions, although it's very vague on what we actually need to do. It seemed to throw in some third world, some third worldist ideology about divided and uneven development and like we need to shift development into the periphery, which, okay, you know most marxists would be like fine, until you're like, and we need to suppress development in the core, which is bizarre work exactly.
Leigh Philips :How do you have economic development of the south but none in the north, thus requiring that the south not sell anything to the north and the north not sell anything to the south?
Matt Huber:certainly not bananas. There are no bananas have you?
Leigh Philips :did you ever? Did you follow the no bananas debate?
C. Derick Varn:yes, well, I mean, one of the things that this seems to imply is there should be no social labor like yes, we all realize that we live in an imperial system and the imperial system is an outgrowth of capitalism.
C. Derick Varn:I'm not going to do my normal, sorry, maoist things, because they seem to think that it's inverted, but this accumulation fundamentally benefits everybody. I mean, for example, uh, I've gotten, uh, uh, several ingles de mora on the show and we talked about, you know the, the actual, uh, ecology of socialist states. But one of the things we we both talked about is that you do have to make trade-offs and that a lot of these trade-offs are only possible by leak frogging prior technology. So, like china has been able to grow leaps and bounds, partly because it doesn't have to reinvent everything that everybody else has already invented in the capitalist world or in the soviet one. Yeah, um, so it just seems like a very strange notion of we're going to freeze this for some people. We're going to somehow keep them not mixing. I guess this also implies nationalism, although Saito doesn't go there.
C. Derick Varn:I've been trying to figure out.
Leigh Philips :Go ahead. I was just going to say I disagree with you completely. It's just really vague. You scratch the surface just a little bit and it just unravels, because it would of course have to follow that There'd have to be sort of global self-autarky for that to happen, and nobody ever articulates that. But that is the logical consequence of what they're saying.
Leigh Philips :And there are many, many other issues where there's just it is true that they're not primitivists like John Zerzan and Deep Green Resistance and so on and so forth they really aren't but the logical consequence of Kohei Saito's claim that technology under capitalism what he calls real subsumption is inherently infected by capitalist social relations. Therefore, we need to get rid of it or we can't make use of it. And he says we have to start from scratch. This is where the title came from for our essay Start From Scratch, socialism. And then at other points he does say oh, but I'm not saying that we need to get rid of everything. Well, because you know, clearly we can make use of some things. Well, but if you can make use of some things, that completely vitiates this thesis of real subsumption that technology under capitalism is inherently infected with the capitalist social relations. It's just incoherent, and it's just easy to see how incoherent it is.
C. Derick Varn:So, instead of dealing with the teleology of capitalist technology and reproductive production and repurposing that teleology for social production and reproduction, it's just we have to give it up, just throw it away. Except when we don't maybe.
Matt Huber:I think our position has been caricatured by some, that we just take the capitalist technology and it's fine and we just use it. But I think the correct term is what you just said repurpose. There's no Marxist theory of history that just starts from scratch and just like burns everything and builds a new world. Like historical materialism is about societies coming out of the material conditions that came before and then repurposing these technologies towards more liberatory ends. Right, because I think it's true that under capitalism there's a lot of technology that is designed expressly to dominate workers, exploit workers. I mean, amazon's trying to patent a watch that they make their workers wear, that tracks their every move, and you know like these are parts of the technology under capitalism. But Marx is very clear that capitalism also has, again, this sort of inherent tendency to develop labor-saving technology that could be repurposed in all sorts of ways to, you know, automate a lot of things and free up time for us and really and obviously we're going to have to make use of all of that.
Matt Huber:And another thing you just said is social labor, right, and that's to me the the main point of Marx's theory of capital actually is that capital socializes labor, right. It? It makes labor more cooperative and more social. And and now we're in, we're actually looking at the process that Marx called the collective worker. He was kind of talking about, you know, like these large scale factories where you're, but now you know you talk about global supply chains.
Matt Huber:The collective worker is a global kind of organism that is really, it's really socialized the production process on a planetary scale. Right, and that socialization of production has, as you just said, derek, led to so many benefits all across the globe for countless numbers of people. But ultimately the socialization is only the main gains from it are appropriated by the capitalist class who controls that socialization of labor. And what socialists say is that if capital is already socializing production, why don't we socialize control over the production and take social control over it and again repurpose it towards human and social needs, but also trying to solve a lot of these ecological problems that we face?
C. Derick Varn:So, before we get into the specifics of the Anthropocene book, I do want to talk about a few moves. I've noticed from Saito that I've seen, since the new left, one real subsumption being an outcard for whatever you want to say, it is going to be an outcard for which, by the way, for those of you who don't know, that's a section of is it, capital of Grendessa? That was extracted from the text.
Matt Huber:Yes, it's the appendix to volume one in the Penguin edition, Right, he does mention it briefly. In the main I think it's chapter 16 of Capital. But the main sort of articulation of formal to real subsumption is in what's called results of the immediate process of production, which is the appendix of the Penguin edition of Volume 1. It was apparently going to be part of Volume 1 at some point and then it got taken out.
C. Derick Varn:I find it interesting how many different groups use this text for different things. Negri used it to argue that we couldn't have political reforms anymore. The communization movement around EndNote used it to argue that we shouldn't worry about the working class at all, which I've been very suspect from professors, but nonetheless I'm going to put that on star for a trick. I've seen a lot. I shouldn't say a trick, but there are certain kinds of things. Other one, and I actually do think these letters are important, but not in the way that saito uses them. The veris asulic letters are also used to basically say that whatever you think you don't like about, um, anti-during and look, there's stuff not to like about anti-during I'll admit that um, uh, you can use the veris asulic letters to go uh-uh, it's all bad. Mark's broke with Ingalls and I find it very funny because the reason why we know about the Varys letters is Ingalls Like he's why we have them before
C. Derick Varn:the Mega 2. They were actually published by him relatively early. But let's see, it's the same reason why we know about the Kikita Gurtha program as Ingalls. So you know, I find it interesting that, for completely different reasons that were done in the 70s, saito is using this. You know Marx, good Ingalls, bad thing. Now, in the 70s this was Marx, good Engels, bad Soviet. You know communism and that's not what Saito is concerned about. But it's the same move. I mean, it's exactly the same move actually, I mean with the same text being invoked.
C. Derick Varn:Given the amount of work that Saito has done in the mega archives, I have a hard time believing that he doesn't kind of know this. But I should not impugn motives to someone I haven't ever spoke to. So what do we make of that and why do we think? I mean, why do we think so many people are trying to put this degrowth stuff into Marxism? Because it's even I mean, as you guys have hinted, but I asked him when he was on my show. It seems kind of spooked John Bellamy Foster a little bit.
Matt Huber:Yeah, for sure. I mean, Foster was just interviewed in the monthly review this month and he basically comes out and says that there's just no evidence for what Saito is claiming. Comes out and says that there's just no evidence for what Saito is claiming. And again, like I said before, foster is quite fond of Ingalls and his ecological contributions to historical materialism. So this Ingalls move it's very curious. It's not clear why Saito went that direction, but it's quite extreme. I mean Ingalls claims that Marx reviewed anti-During and commented on it, even wrote parts of it, I think is one of the claims, and Saito just says that this isn't credible. That essentially Ingalls is lying about this, like, like, what is? It's very confusing to me Because anti-During is so much against the degrowth communist sort of abandoning historical materialism, like all these ideas, like if Marx approved of anti-During it could never be true.
Leigh Philips :So therefore Ingalls is lying sorry, oh no, no, no no. I was just going to say it is quite frustrating how Saito has responded to our piece. I think I can't remember which interview it was with him the Atlantic that's right. It was the one in the Atlantic, which goes to show how that's was the one in the Atlantic, which goes to show how that's crazy.
C. Derick Varn:That was in the Atlantic. Yeah, absolutely. Liberals are Blowing up.
Leigh Philips :Glowing, very softball Puff Piece interviews with him and reviews of his work in the New York Times and many other NPR and stuff. That's a whole other thing about how really threatening is he. But his response to our critique in the Atlantic was that well, we haven't read what he's read in the mega, so like we don't know what we're talking about. Well, but we have, and surely every other Marxist in the last hundred years has read a lot of the Marxist canon. And so if there's some like some super secret stuff that he hasn't told us about yet, beyond what he has shown us the, the like the Zasulich letters and like Bilby Foster's couple of footnotes Tell us. Okay, we'll happily admit that it does turn out to be the case that Marx was some sort of Neo-Malthusian after all and he did have this sort of radical break in 1867 and he abandoned historical materials. And please lay it on us.
C. Derick Varn:The other thing I can say is the other Mega II scholars, marcel Musto and Tarsell Carver, have not and Tarsell Carver is the Mega II Engel scholar have not signed on to these claims, even if they initially endorsed Saito's early work. I mean, I've looked for it because I'm like, okay, has Carver said that Saito's right about this claim about anti-During?
Matt Huber:I need to look at it again, but Saito cites so this claim I just said before, where Ingalls is lying about Mark's reviewing anti-During and approving of it, that he cites Carver for that claim. And I went to Carver I looked at it and I didn't. Again I have to look at it again. I didn't see any convincing evidence that Carver was able to present that this was a lie. This is Ingalls just making stuff up like so, um, yeah, so I don't. Uh, I think, carver, am I wrong? Didn't you write a book called like post-modern marxism or something like I don't know, um, uh, about, um, that particular claim? But it just again it seems outlandish that why would Ingalls lie about this?
Leigh Philips :I don't want to impute sort of any malevolent motives to Saito and his publishers. I think Saito probably believes that he has developed a new reading of Marx. I would put the greater blame on the fact that over the last 20, 30 years there has been a tendency within the humanities and and other left you know left scholarship more broadly that to accept that a reading of that you know the death of the author, that any particular reading is legitimate, you don't really have to strongly substantiate your claims and that if anybody does contest the evidence that you've brought to bear, oh well, that's a different reading or they haven't read what I've read. I mean, I don't want to be like a STEM nerd, but I do think that there are things that are true and there are things that are not true. There are claims that are testable and this doesn't pass the sniff test.
C. Derick Varn:Hmm, well, one of the things that I think that this is unfortunate about is that you know, beyond, say, uh, the death of the author, which, um, you know, we can get into the mountain bailey there, because in one sense, yes, uh, people are not, they're just so locuses of their own ideas, but in the other sense, it doesn't mean you can reappropriate everything out of context infinitely, um, I mean, even umberto echo complained about that, and he's just liberal, um, but I do think we, we, we have to to look at another, like one problem I think that you have in in scholarship and I'm going to say all scholarship, uh, because I don't think I've just seen this in marx, in marxism but I'm going to come back to this with Marxism in a second is the need for novel claims to make things more publishable.
C. Derick Varn:You know, like this really does seem to be a problem, like you know, that's why I pointed out the Sassouli letters and the real subsumption, because those seem to be the areas that you can go to, maybe also the notes on the machine from the sassouish letters and the real subsumption, because those seem to be the areas that you can go to, maybe also the notes on the machine from the gringessa, whatever. There's like a. There's a couple of times that everyone goes to to to be like, everything you know about marx is wrong, you know, and it can go in any direction and that's what's so surprising. It's not just that you know, uh, it's not just saito who who's using these pieces, like people use them to go in all kinds of directions.
Leigh Philips :Beyond just Saito? Isn't this potentially a problem with how? Again the neoliberal revolution? Neoliberal revolution, it's a thoroughgoing victory over even our own institutions, such as left-wing publishing houses, left-wing scholarship you have no choice but to in the neoliberal academy, but you can't consistently come up with novelty. That is downstream of the gutting of public funding of universities, of the turning of universities into basically insurance and real estate financial institutions rather than schools, the growth of administrative bloat, the end of the Republic of Letters, scholars no longer truly controlling their departments, the need to publish or perish, and on, and, on, and, on and on. I mean I would not be surprised, and actually I shouldn't say this, no, but we should know that our left-wing publishing houses are, at the end of the day, capitalist entities. It's great that they exist, but they have to survive. And if it happens to be the case that publishing curious novelties like this, or doom-mongering climate texts that don't actually represent the already scary enough climate science, when they do that, is it not possible that they're doing that because that's what sells?
Matt Huber:I will also say that I'm an academic and I'm in the field of geography and what could be called critical environmental studies more broadly, and I can tell you, I mean there's nothing hotter in these realms than degrowth. Right now, I mean, everyone wants to talk about degrowth and linking it to decolonial this and that and linking it to abolition or whatever. But so if you could, if you could show that Marx was a degrowth communist, like there is a huge appetite for that in academia right now. And I will say that Saito, particularly in the bestsellers that's translated as Slow Down, you know he does not do anything new in the degrowth literature, he just appropriates it and represents it very. You know he does not do anything new in the degrowth literature, he just appropriates it and represents it very. You know he does a decent job. He, you know, talks about the planetary boundaries.
Matt Huber:He, he kind of does a very jason hickle type sort of overview of why we need to degrow, why decoupling doesn't work. Of course, uh, lee, can, can give the the the counter to that. But but then the book shifts like to okay, now we're going to Marx and now we're going to show how Marx was a degrowth communist. So I think that is kind of the niche he's filling, like, look, degrowth is great, everyone loves it. And look, I can show you that not only does everyone love it, but I found out that Marx himself was a degrowth communist. Therefore, the end of the book can be like okay, now we're doing degrowth communism, the future is, is is degrowth communism. And, of course, when he gets to the end it's a weird kind of um uh hodgepodge of small scale, pretty anarchist solutions that again have really nothing to do with um, with with kind of marxism. Um, and you know he talks about like horizontal solidarity, autonomous zones, localizing agriculture sounds very much more like of the occupy era than than of a kind of marxist approach to politics.
C. Derick Varn:Sounds like david graber. Yeah, exactly exactly.
Matt Huber:It's very anarchist and there's nothing about the state, there's nothing about unions and, as we say in the piece, there's nothing about the working class or anything about the role of the working class in bringing this degrowth communist future. But I think there's a huge appetite for it in academia. I'll say that.
Leigh Philips :And it is a crying shame. It really is a crying shame, because you know it was. I think it's like it's 27 years since the Kyoto Protocol this year. Is that right, yeah, 1997.
Matt Huber:1997.
Leigh Philips :No right, yeah, yeah, yeah, 28 years 1997. Yeah 1997.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, no, yeah 27. And we and we feel thanks, me too.
Leigh Philips :And um, we are 26. Is that right? 20, uh, 26 years away from 2050. The uh? The date at which all countries have pledged to, or most countries have pledged to, reach net zero emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change, either 1.5 degrees by the end of the century or two degrees. Um, it was, what was it? Um? 86 percent of um energy production in 1997 let me make sure I've got this right 86 percent of energy production was from in 1927, was from fossil fuels. Yeah, 82 percent of global um energy production is from fossil fuels in in 2024. So, for fuck's sake, well, I mean, that is. That is pathetic. That is uh, um, I mean, it's not. It's almost a rounding error.
Leigh Philips :Um, uh, there, um, by god, do we need um a much more aggressive climate policy, and there's already. As Matt and myself and some of our co-thinkers, like Fred Stafford, a few other folks Paul Prescott, gail Brooks have said, markets aren't up to the task. We need much more industrial policy to shut at a minimum, hopefully extending towards public ownership in many crucial areas To better court, because markets well one markets are just really bad at coordinating the solving of grand tasks that straddle multiple economic sectors At a bare minimum. We need a seriously muscular social democracy on an almost global level, like this is. So, basically, we've already got already got a really great analysis as to why it is that we have barely shifted the needle with respect to decarbonization. It's already there within Marxism and its critique of let's call it, to use a contemporary discourse around AI. The great problem with AI is supposed to be the future, the AI alignment problem. Well, we have a market alignment problem in that humanity doesn't control it. It is completely amoral, anarchic, it is directed by its own incentives. And the solution to this and many, many other existential threats that we face from pandemics to antimicrobial resistance, to even things like space debris and near-Earth asteroids, which are really sort of sci-fi kind of stuff it is democratic control, greater cooperation, ending the or at least severely constraining that amoral, anarchic market incentive, internationalism and so on and so forth. It's already there. Why do you need this extra novelty?
Leigh Philips :And the other really frustrating thing about this discourse is our critics are forever saying we just want, basically, capitalism to stay the same, except it'll all be publicly owned. My God, if all'll all be publicly owned. My god, like if everything, like all the production was publicly owned, that's. That is like a gargantuan revolutionary transformation. It's almost as if these people think of capitalism not as a set of economic relations, but instead industrial stuff, and they don't like industrial stuff, whether it's privately produced or publicly produced. We just want something completely different. We don't want this. Completely different, we don't want this. That's AJ Singh Chowdhury's book. He devotes an entire chapter, an entire chapter, brother and sister, to just me and Matt.
Matt Huber:It's like 60 pages too. It's insane, it's crazy.
Leigh Philips :And his main critique basically comes down to the fact that we just want everything to remain the same, except it be socialist. I don't, and I was listening to him today on Novara FM, the British far-left media empire, which in many respects is very good. Sometimes they do interviews like this where I'm vomitous, but and he was again he was, he was saying that base basically this argument that well, I've spoken to so many people and they just they're so exhausted, they're the exhausted of the earth and they just they don't even know why we I'm sorry that's his accent, I should be making fun of Zach's I don't even know why we have the world that we have. This is romanticism, this is utopianism. This is exactly the stuff that Engels was raging against in Antiduring and socialism utopianism. We're supposed to be hard-headed. We're supposed to be fucking serious, excuse me, bloody serious, very, very hard-nosed, industrially minded, understanding industrial processes, understanding the key economic relations, and I think that the only people who really have come to grips with what needs to be done in order to solve climate change, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss and so on and so forth, are those of us in this school of I mean, sometimes it's called left-wing co-modernism. I just think it's like plain vanilla socialism that is very bloody serious about industrial policy at a minimum, about public ownership, about vertically integrated utilities, about the power of labor crucially industrial labor. About a integrated utilities. About the power of labor crucially industrial labor. About a just transition, the technologies that we still need to invent for things like decarbonizing cement. We don't know how to decarbonize cement, or, well, about 85% of cement use cases. It's really hard to decarbonize steel. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? It's really hard to decarbonize steel. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? It's really hard to decarbonize aluminum, or, as we say in the common word, aluminium and all of this stuff. If it isn't profitable for it to be done, it will not be done.
Leigh Philips :We desperately need better innovation policy, industrial policy, research and development, de-risking of technology. We need technology even for those technologies that already we know that they work and are clean. In many cases they're far too expensive for many countries in the developing world to purchase, to use, to deploy. They need to be a lot cheaper. How are we going to make them cheaper? We need better innovation. Again, the capitalist class will not if they can't make any money of that. They won't do it. So all of this really does. As I said, I don't want to repeat myself. There's already lots of stuff that needs to be done desperately. There's a great analysis that we have. There are people who articulate it um, uh, let's be, let's be doing a lot more of that stuff instead of this.
C. Derick Varn:this ridiculous, these ridiculous debates, um about like get, get with the program this does, uh, lead me to ask a question I think is going to maybe make a lot of my listeners a little bit uncomfortable, and that is the pairing of very milquetoast demands and dreams, um, with radically impossible ones. And I'll give you an example, like an abolishing police and abolishing prison set. I am, um, I am not necessarily a police abolitionist, I am actually kind of a prison abolitionist Because I used to work in one. But those are massive social infrastructure changes, all right. And if you were to say, abolish the police, what you'd have to classically replace them with in the 19th century was a universal militia where everyone's basically the police, everybody's basically, and you know, it is kind of like the. You know, I might, I might even frame it to liberals like yeah, it's community policing on crack.
Leigh Philips :You know private militias and can working class people and working class communities afford decent like? What is the cooperative police militia going to look like compared to the private militias that the billionaire class can offend, is already affording and is already implementing in the face of under policing? I agree with. With prison abolition, this is another great not to go off on a tangent here, but okay, I'll go on a tangent If we're very like I'm very sympathetic to a sort of long range conception of something along those lines where we serve. I don't think we'll ever get rid of prisons, but I think we can definitely asymptote towards something close to that. And where in the world already do we see that sort of thing? Has that already begun to happen, at least to some degree?
Leigh Philips :I don't want to like it's a cliche to sing the praises of Scandinavia. Absolutely, it has its own problems. Sweden has been gripped with terrible crime in recent years for all sorts of complicated reasons, but until relatively recently, if you look at the countries that have been doing the best in terms of elimination or reduction of police brutality, of even closing prisons because there just aren't enough people to fill the prisons, prisons because there just aren't enough people to fill the prisons. It is those more muscular social democratic countries with greater levels of state intervention, much more generous welfare provision, again, as we know it's all you know, there's been cuts there as well. So, and regulations all you know, there's been cuts there as well, so, and regulations, where you know there are psychological profiles of police to exclude people who are particularly, have tendencies towards violence, might have psychological problems that suggest that they're really not very well suited to this. You have to have a lot more education to be able to uh and training to become a police officer, um, and a prison officer, and so on and so forth.
Leigh Philips :So I mean, I I know people are just gonna like listen to this and say, oh, he's just a fucking social democrat. Well, I, I'm sorry, but like I really do um believe that there is no distinction between socialism and social democracy, that the process of communization is much more akin to the Reformation than it is to the French Revolution. Inevitably it is. What do we have to do uh is steadily build uh institutions of, of working class power and democracy um over time. It is a multi-generational project. Social democracy, muscular social democracy, not the social democrats of tony blair and so on and so forth that we see these days, but seriously um constructing those social institutions over time.
C. Derick Varn:Well, this gets us to the problem of radical chic, though, because I mean part of my point in bringing this up, and I I don't disagree with everything you just said there.
C. Derick Varn:I think you and I have had these discussions about how radical the change might need to be, and we just we'd agreed and disagreed on elements of it in the past. But, um, one thing I would say is that I think about the, the demands after the floyd uprising insurrection, whatever you want to call it, um, um, and what people got two years out like. So demands were first abolished, the police, which was immediately retranslated to defund the police, and then people should be very careful, because this Martin Bailey thing goes both ways, right, like, there's both, like the, the. Uh, I'm presenting the moderate thing that I have, this radical thing that seems cool, and then I go back and forth. But there's also I'm presenting the thing that sounds radical, but it's really I'm hiding in it this thing that's going to do nothing, right like um, so defunding, the police have always said, is like, well, that's I mean one taking them thinking what?
C. Derick Varn:just from the? Not even dealing with the logistics of crime, the idea that you're going to take away money from the people with the most guns and just leave them alone seems to be a little bit of a bad idea.
Leigh Philips :Um, but beyond that, um, well, to tie it back to sort of climate and environmental questions, yeah, the irony is that they're just not very radical in some of their demands, like at the end of slow down, as matt was saying. Okay, so what does this really look like? So like, practically, what are the policies? How do we add together 50%?
C. Derick Varn:of the population works in agriculture, or something it's like yeah, local co-ops.
Leigh Philips :It's a four-day work week. It's more buses, everybody should bike everywhere. It's like, really that's it. I mean, you know there's no sort of. It sounds super radical, but actually there's. It's a bit of a nothing burger.
Leigh Philips :I mean, I'm not necessarily opposed to a four-day work week. I think it's a lovely idea that every society should constantly promise its people that as the forces of production develop hopefully every generation we will be able to make the work week shorter. I mean, I just think that's something. Maybe even put something like that in the cost, it's great. Why not? I don't know how?
Leigh Philips :Or like ending planned obsolescence. I mean I think it's a dick move on the part of Apple that I can't fix things directly and that they have a proprietary screwdriver so that, like, even third-party engineers can't like put technicians can't pull it apart and put in a new battery and stuff like that. I think I think that's all bullshit. But that's now that's not where the, the bulk of emissions, are coming from. So the, the ambition is just really, really low. The bulk of emissions comes not from fast fashion or planned obsolescence or the fact that we have a five-day work week rather than a four-day work week. It's a fact that it comes from the vast majority, comes from vitally socially necessary production like housing, like building schools, like electricity, like transport. Um, um, it's still in cement yeah, it's still in cement.
Leigh Philips :Um, so the the it's a not. It doesn't even come to grips with the scale of the challenge that we face. It doesn't touch the and makes you wonder have they even read the annual spreadsheets of emissions outputs for national inventories? That's the word the national emissions inventories that every country has to submit to the UNFCCC, because if you read that you're like well, this is clearly these solutions around planned obsolescence and less packaging are going to do nothing. If anything, on less packaging, you would massively increase food waste, which is one of the largest sources of emissions within the within the agricultural sector. So some of them are just like completely counterproductive anyway.
Matt Huber:But my point here is just crap, sorry we've, we've come full circle, because you see how this appeals, though, to a middle class person that's anxious about their consumption and and the packaging and the fast fashion, and you know, like in the fact that people drive suv, I mean middle-class people are constantly anxious and guilty about the consumptive world they're surrounded by and and therefore, if their, if your program is to scale down all that, it really appeals to that middle class. But, as you said, it has nothing to do with the real decarbonization challenge, which is more towards I use this in my book what Mark's called the hidden abode of production. It is steel, cement, chemicals, these really industrial processes that are at the core of electricity being the core one as well. But again, you know like, fundamentally, where Saito ends his sort of degrowth communist future is this vision of radical abundance, which I think I share, which is that communism is really about free time for not just like individuals to develop ourselves, but also, like you know, just for, you know like leisure and and collective effervescence or whatever. And you know like that's right there in Marx. It is in the Grandriza where he talks about disposable time, and it is in volume three when he talks about the realm of freedom.
Matt Huber:But what Saito misses is that Marx is very clear that, like, to make that realm of freedom and abundance possible, you need such a hyper-efficient, socialized production system that can really make, create the material conditions for freedom for all. Right, um, because if you just have, uh, you know everyone, uh, uh, working on farms and stuff, you're, you know most people are going to be working very long days and, um, if you, uh, you know, if you, if you, if you want to create free time for some, you can in society, you know certain people with privilege can like do slow food and like spend all their time, you know, hanging out and cooking. But, like, if you want abundance for all and free time for all, you need really massively efficient, large-scale production systems that capitalism is particularly good at developing and that we could repurpose towards that end.
C. Derick Varn:Well, free time and consumptive goods are classed experiences. I mean, there's almost a rent on them. And I think about this, about like aspirational trad wife tick tock, because I live in Utah. There's a lot of it here and and I'm not saying that degrowth, communism is exactly that. But when I'm like, if you want to spend the I don't know a month and a half to make a sandwich cause you're trying to produce it all within a uh, uh, within a small family subsistence farm, go ahead, I guess, um, uh, but most people can't do that and you know, I think it's interesting that that this, the cytos, actual uh suggestions are so milquetoast, um, because the other degrowth but the other degroof bones, like half of communism and stuff like that aren't as milk toast but they're clearly not possible.
Leigh Philips :So yeah, their global mandatory veganism is. That's in the half-earth socialism book and also like renew, 100 renewables plus biofuels. Much more seriously yeah.
Matt Huber:Land-intensive energy is what they're into.
Leigh Philips :Again this, yeah, absolutely, again. This really underscores how counterproductive this is. These people are always accusing us of carbon tunnel syndrome, that we only focus on climate change. No, we don't. We talk about land use, biodiversity loss, nitrogen pollution, etc. And if you're going to have this much more organic food production and you're abandoning industrial agriculture, necessarily your yields will go down, which means that the land use footprint is going to be enormous, massively increased. And again, the biggest cause of biodiversity loss bar none not hunting, not overfishing it's land use change for crop production.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, when I see that I'm like is me being being the elephant in the room guy again? But like I was like, well, at least the primitives admit that you're gonna have to have a mice population die off, but you're saying we're not gonna have that. So are we gonna strip all the world's forests to have enough arable land to do this? Because that's what it sounds like.
Leigh Philips :Yeah, um, the, the um. The primitivists are at least coherent. They are 100 coherent.
Matt Huber:They're mad but they're coherent mad in the crazy sense, right oh sorry, yeah, again both usually but yeah, they're also very angry.
Leigh Philips :I think they are um the going back to this, this question around, to this question around why this appeals so much to middle class guilt and why it is so alienating, so rebarbative to the vast bulk of the working class. Do we hear Bernie Sanders trot out that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? I don't know if the figure is exactly correct, but he's broadly not wrong. And so if 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and you say, well, don't worry, in the radical abundance that we promise of a four-day work week, it's going to be great, and I could already have a four-day work week, I would just earn less, and it's oh no, oh, okay, so it's a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Okay, I don't disagree. I think that's a grand ambition. But then surely, if you have extra free time but a lot more money for that, you're going to be buying more things with those wages, isn't that more production? And therefore, so long as you don't absolutely decouple from greenhouse gas emissions, you're going to be increasing emissions. So, one, it doesn't make any sense. But two, it's just very, very rebarbative, because most people do not feel that they are living again, as Saito says, living an extravagant lifestyle, or that they're living in the imperial mode of living, that they need to consume less.
Leigh Philips :The vast majority of ordinary people, um, desperately want to be able to consume a lot more. My God, I know I do. I'm a fucking journalist. I don't earn much money. We all know that the crisis of, of, of, of journalism, um, how, how, our, how, our, our, our incomes have been declined and how many of us are being laid off. I would desperately, desperately. You know, I make this sort of joke in my first book about how, when I was at university and Naomi Klein's no Logo inspired a bunch of anarchists to go around with these leaflets telling everybody on the first, the day after Black Friday, after Thanksgiving, which we have, you know, we have a different Thanksgiving in Canada, but whatever, and they called it like Buy Nothing Day. Yeah, and I, you know I was maxed out on student loans. My parents didn't have any cash to lend me. There were many times where I had to get food from food banks, times where I had to get food from food banks. I wanted desperately for there to be finally able to buy a lot more days, not buy nothing days. And that's how most people feel in the American economy, the Canadian economy, the British economy, the French economy.
Leigh Philips :It is no wonder that these people are just not winning any votes amongst I mean the European elections on Sunday. Huge collapse in the vote for green parties, masses swinging to the far right, including amongst young people. And again it is such a shame because there is a really great left wing, left green response. Plants, offshore wind and explaining why it is that capitalism doesn't do a good job of developing offshore wind. Matt and Fred Stafford, fantastic piece in Damage magazine on some of these issues. I wish that there were a large group of political parties that were able to put forth that sort of muscular social democracy, that strong trade unionism, that just transition that takes all of these environmental issues seriously. The closest we ever got to that was the Green New Deal, a program of Bernie Sanders, but again to some extent that was watered down with the addition of all sorts of very strange not PMC but middle class NGO sort of addenda to it, like we're going to ban aviation and burgers, we, it's so necessary and it could happen, but it's just not being done. I just don't see it anywhere other than that brief moment.
Leigh Philips :I'm cautiously optimistic about the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States and associated pivots towards industrial policy. I think the left should lean into that. It doesn't go anywhere near far enough, but it is a significant break with neoliberal businesses as usual thinking that just carbon pricing market mechanisms are the way to go. It is state intervention. What we should be doing is we should say this doesn't go far enough. We need protection of vertically integrated utilities. We need, where the Overton window is a little bit further to the left, in places like Canada, where we already have lots of public ownership of the electricity sector so well, it should be the. We should have more public ownership and just a very serious strategic strategy, strategic program, that is, that is adapted to whatever locale, depending on the the balance of the forces in that particular locale um, I do think that there's there's a strategic thing that we could be taking away from this which is amping up public ownership and public demands and regulating that out to the various communities, um, but integrating them not just nationally but transnationally.
C. Derick Varn:I mean, one of the weird things right now is both the return to nationalism and to localism, on both the left and the right, at a time where not just for ecological reasons, but ecological reasons are one of the biggest. Uh, that's not a really viable strategy. It's not a good strategy for production.
Leigh Philips :No modern economy can perform autocratically anymore if they ever could, but they definitely can't now 100%.
C. Derick Varn:It just seems to me to be a total pipe dream and I think you guys are kind of right to point this out a little bit of an abandonment of internationalism.
Leigh Philips :Absolutely Look at again. This is the same sort of abandonment of responsibility, this absent without leave with respect to true internationalism where, like just a few days ago, negotiations over a global pandemic treaty that would at least um. We're supposed to be developing um mechanisms, uh, so that if we have another pandemic, we don't, we aren't stuck with the same situation of vaccine apartheid that we did in the last pandemic, where uh the wet, the global north got access to to to vaccines in the global south. Well, you know, fuck you um. And also to develop um, uh sufficient international support, like financial support, to allow for um, um early warning systems, um to be a mechanism of sharing of data, building up of clinics as part of that warning system, so that there can be very rapid reporting into a central locale to know when it seems like something new is spilling over. All this stuff that would probably cost Bill Gates, whatever he's estimated to cost the global economy about 50 billion dollars a year. It's nothing, that's absolutely nothing. It's pennies. We could do this and it was defeated. On the background, on the uh, it seems like it's defeated. We'll see how things uh proceed on the basis of our own economies in the West, particularly Canada, the United States, switzerland, the EU as a whole, britain and France, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, japan, all the countries with very large pharmaceutical sectors. They all defeated it because it requires an overturning or at least a significant reversal or reform of intellectual property law, and it doesn't just undermine profitability with respect to undermines profitability with respect to everything they do, it's their whole business model. You can't have that.
Leigh Philips :Where was the global protest, the Greta Thunbergs, the Extinction Rebellions protesting outside the UN negotiations around that? Where's been international organizing around that? Something on the order of 20 million people died excess deaths, depending on whether you're looking at the economists or the World Health Organization's numbers Something on the order of about 20 million excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we got off lightly because this was just. It wasn't the big one, it wasn't the big bird flu that we're expecting with the high mortality rate that we've been sort of dreading for decades, that we've been sort of dreading for decades. That is far more than the WHO estimated 250,000 who would die every year between the like 2030s and 2050s as a result of climate change. 20 million and it's going to be a lot worse next time versus, you know, a few hundred thousand every year from climate change.
Leigh Philips :I don't want to few hundred thousand every year from climate change. I don't want to undermine the severity and seriousness of climate change. It is serious, but pandemics are what? Is that? Three orders of magnitude greater. Where is the international left on that? Where is the movement? Complete abandonment of responsibility as a result of this.
C. Derick Varn:I suspect they don't know about it.
Leigh Philips :Localism to municipal nonsense. Small is beautiful.
Matt Huber:And there's another key part of the if you're going to focus on international climate agenda, I mean key part of the, you know, if you're going to focus on an international climate agenda, I mean the degrowth. People are so sort of obsessed with this idea that, like the global north is explo, the global South is, is many parts of it just don't even have modern sanitation infrastructure, don't have elect access to electricity. You know, over a hundred years ago Lenin talked about communism as electrification of the whole. I mean, could you imagine Lenin looking today and being like wait, we still haven't electrified fucking humanity. Like how scandalous is that from a marxist perspective?
Leigh Philips :and um, so there really is not of uh so much global warming should be so much worse if we had actually electrified the world. Well, under global socialism, I mean. But that would have been a good situation to have, ironically, because then it would mean that there's hospitals in every uh locale in the world.
Matt Huber:Um, there's electricity everywhere but now we have the opportunity to. You know, we have this global crisis of climate change that centrally involves electricity, and you know we, if we can use this kind of muscular social democracy to force publicly owned solutions to actually like come out into the market, then there could be a way in which the global internationalist climate agenda could be about decarbonization but also electrification of the world and many impoverished people that need access to electricity. But I think in general, like the, there's a problem on the left where everyone just wants to think about single issue movements. Like there's the climate movement and it's doing its thing Right.
Matt Huber:But I don't think we're going to um move the needle much unless there's just a broad based kind of anti-austerity movement that does focus on public goods, like we're just going to invest in public goods, because that's what the neoliberal period has been about. It's been about austerity and disinvestment in the kind of public sector and there has to be a broad-based attack on that regime of capitalism and it has to focus on all sorts of things like healthcare and education, like that have nothing to do with climate. But it's very easy to like bring in climate aspects to that kind of broad-based anti-austerity public infrastructure, public investment agenda that could not only solve issues in the global north, but again, like that's what you know, that's what the global south has faced as well with, like structural adjustment and you know, the Washington consensus and all this stuff, no-transcript, I think if, absolutely if we've got, you know, as they repeatedly exaggeratedly say, uh, we have just 10 years left to save the planet.
Leigh Philips :Um, is it more likely to achieve global degrowth communism in 10 years or more likely that we achieve some level of revival of muscular social democracy and strong trade unions and industrial policy? I, you know it's. The latter is definitely still a big ask, but it's. We have a lot more. It's a lot more realistic to expect that we could go further down that road in the next 10 years than, as they say, global communist deep growth revolution.
C. Derick Varn:Yes, I think that's a good point to end. Thank you, lee and Matt. I will link the now somewhat infamous Jackman article in the show notes. If you haven't read it, you can find it there.
Leigh Philips :Others have said it was searing.
C. Derick Varn:So anything you two would like to plug on the way out.
Matt Huber:You already did it.
Leigh Philips :Damage Magazine has a lot of good stuff coming out um I don't have anything big coming out um soon because I've just been focusing on my thesis finishing my degree um. But knock on wood, going, going through the hopefully final edits on a piece which will, I think, rustle some jimmies Defending anthropocentrism soon.
C. Derick Varn:That will rustle some jimmies, all right. Well, on that note, I'll be looking for Lee to cause controversy. All right, thank you, thank you.
