Prolekult Films on Capitalism or Extinction

Is capitalism the true culprit behind our environmental crises?" Join us for a thought-provoking episode featuring James from ProCult Films as we unravel the intricate connections between industrial capitalism, societal evolution, and ecological degradation. We challenge the conventional narrative that blames humanity at large for climate change and mass extinction, spotlighting instead the pivotal role of capitalistic dynamics. Our conversation takes you through the historical emergence of capitalism in Britain, contrasting it with other societies like ancient Rome, while also pondering the societal shifts that industrialization has precipitated.

Our journey doesn't stop there. We navigate the complexities of constructing a feasible Marxist movement in the modern age, exploring alternative socio-economic models like eco-socialism. From illegal mining in the Amazon to the criminal underpinnings of early capitalist societies, we dissect the dark side of economic development. James helps us challenge the viability of eco-modernism versus degrowth, prompting listeners to consider how social dynamics intertwine with ecological transformation. Together, we scrutinize the political realities and ecological challenges that face our world, seeking to understand how historical precedents can inform future societal change.

The episode is also a window into the behind-the-scenes efforts of documentary production. James shares insights into the labor-intensive process of creating content-rich documentaries that question the status quo and inspire critical reflection. Our discussion underscores the importance of understanding rural class relations and the need for educational movements that transcend ideological boundaries. With a focus on creating sustainable change, this episode invites listeners to rethink the pathways to a more equitable and environmentally sound future.

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

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to VARVlog, and today I'm talking to James at ProCult Films and we are discussing a bunch of things, but particularly a recent two-hour documentary on capitalism and the current environmental degradation, but also just in general, you've been running series on Marxology and eco-socialism and the debates around that, around this uh documentary as well, um are quite good. One of the key points in your most recent documentary I think I want to start us off talking about is the idea that the problems of the Anthropocene are just human activity, like other, say, mass extinctions that might be related to humans in the past, such as the extinctions of the megafauna, and this seems to be actually a direct contradiction to the evidence about what industrial development for capitalist purposes has done. So I wanted to start us off talking about that. And why isn't capitalism as a form of organizing human life and not humans in general? That is the problem here.

Prolekult Films: 2:06

Okay, yeah, first, hey, everyone, thanks again for having me on. It's great to be back and yeah, there's a few questions there that we could kind of get into. I think in terms of there's kind of two different questions I guess maybe we should kind of focus on separately. The first would be like how this perception that human activity in general has caused the climate and extinction crises the climate crisis being an aspect of the extinction crisis, I think it's really important to always emphasise, given the relative weight given to them in the broader discourses. So how we've kind of seen many different kind of scientists, economists, politicians, popular kind of thinkers kind of come to the conclusion that human activity, in the abstract, as a kind of force upon the earth, has kind of caused these phenomena rather than a particular organization of it. And then secondly, I guess, going on to capitalism and why it's been able to form an extinction crisis in the kind of way that this kind of supposition of all human activity has. And so those are really complicated and quite difficult to get into questions because there's a lot of detail implicated in all of them. The first thing, I think, in terms of how that perception that humans in general are responsible for the climate and extinction crises is kind of formed is out of certain problems in kind of knowledge production and certain kinds of ways of thinking within the various different disciplines that have to approach these things. So that's kind of perhaps not a conclusion that you would hear articulated that often, I think, on the Marxist left. I mean, I've read a lot of eco-socialist literature around this and there's kind of a critique of neo-Malthusian that takes precedence and so on and so forth and those things are definitely aspects of it. But I think if we go deeper into it and we look at how this knowledge enters society first, we enter into kind of much more amenable conclusions which allow us to kind of have a less pessimistic outlook on the kind of outlook of the scientific community for one, then also kind of understand how these things feed through different forms of information distribution and so on and so forth.

Prolekult Films: 4:12

So when we're looking at something like mass extinction, which is what the film kind of focuses on, that we did the long film that we did recently, fall and Part One, capital as Extinction and the kind of extinction sciences have to kind of therefore proof that there is a mass extinction happening, that we are living in the sixth mass extinction is one kind of way it's the most popular kind of way it's known. But then whether or not it's the sixth or another one is actually quite highly contested within various different fields. And to do that you need to have certain kind of different disciplines come together. You've got a lot of archaeology involved, a lot of geology involved, a lot of paleology involved, lots of different disciplines involved, a lot of geology involved, a lot of paleology involved, lots of different disciplines which all have different ways of quantifying things and different evidential standards that they need to meet in order to produce the knowledge and prove this within their own disciplines. And so when we get to something like extinction science which aggregates all of these things, it also has to have the different evidential standard and a different kind of burden of proof in order to do these things. And so the categorization of a mass extinction first has to be drawn out of historical records and so on and so forth, and that leads us to kind of a number of different conclusions.

Prolekult Films: 5:21

Different criteria arise. So there's one which is kind of a simple, kind of I guess metrical check, which is what's the real extinction rate and what's the deep background time rate like what's the average that animals and plants and so on and so forth have gone extinct over deep time kind of periods, um, say the holocene, or say the kind of geological epoch before it? Um, and then what's the actual extinction rate now? And that would be how you kind of quantify if we live in something like like a mass extinction. The second would be the kind of severity that we expect that to to kind of play out at, based on the different, different kind of strands of ecological phenomena that are affected, how broad that is and how deep that is and how profound that impact is, and that would involve a huge number of different things but also kind of looks.

Prolekult Films: 6:11

When we're looking at the kind of form of a mass extinction. From history we kind of there's this thing called, there are five, called the big five mass extinctions, which saw the extinction, quite arbitrarily, over 75% of like life on earth or set species on earth. And so if we're calling it the sixth mass extinction, then that criteria has to be proven, that this has the potential to get to that point as well, and that criteria has to be proven that this has the potential to get to that point as well. And then the final element is duration. Now, in geological terms a mass extinction is quite short, but for any living species it's going to be like a very long thing that we're not going to see the end of.

Prolekult Films: 6:45

It takes a huge amount of time and the shortest that we kind of know of a mass extinction playing out within these kind of fields on that scale is 5000 years, which is the Triassic Jurassic extinction, and that's a contested date, but that's the shortest kind of widely held to date within the field.

Prolekult Films: 7:09

And so when we're kind of talking about what is the cause of this, you enter into an immediate problem within the field if you're trying to quantify something, because a timescale which looks back at, say, the invention of agriculture and the megafaunal extinctions the invention of agriculture being supposed to be about 12,000 years ago and the megafaunal mass extinctions between 25,000 and 45,000 years ago that gives you a timescale which is much more reasonable within that field of thought than what then we say beginning of kind of industrialized capitalism, which would be about 1, thousand years ago in most kind of estimates, and that provides like a disciplinary incentive to kind of predate it back and it's a bias that kind of has to come into that because we're looking at fossil records, we're looking at processes and we're trying to kind of line this up in a way that makes sense within the discipline and all that kind of comes in at the point of entry of this knowledge.

Prolekult Films: 7:51

I think because of those assumptions that are kind of built into the scientific frameworks for good reasons but that can't really fully account for a socially caused mass extinction, because, well, we've not seen one in the way that this is playing out before. Does that kind of get at some of the initial questions you wanted to?

C. Derick Varn: 8:09

get at yeah, the timescale is interesting, kind of get at some of the initial questions you wanted to get. Yeah, the time scale is interesting, and one of the things that I I often think about when we talk about capitalism is, with capitalism, let's say, we take the, the broadest definition of, uh, capitalism, that isn't just like the libertarian myth that it's just markets right, because markets have existed pretty much since at least agriculture, maybe before it. So if we take capitalism to mean wage labor plus some form of means of reinvestment, plus markets, like you know, a kind of minimal definition that we could also align with Marx. But also, you know, both neoclassical and classical political economy. Capitalism is what?

C. Derick Varn: 9:00

A thousand years old. I mean someone like Jairus Banerjee will push it back to like Rome, which I think is wrong, but still it's. You know the earliest signs of it. You see is like the Italian city states and then the first like capitalist society, you see is in your country. Actually, you know emerges, I think, in Britain after kind of sort of emerging in the Italian city states. There's precursors elsewhere, but there you go Industrial capitalism. When would you date the beginning of what we think of as industrial capital? Because a lot of people put it rather late and I think I would put it a little earlier. But where would you start it?

Prolekult Films: 9:37

So I mean, there's lots of different kind of ways of quantifying that right. So someone like Banaji you're quite right would push it back to maybe Rome, maybe even earlier, with some of his kind of writing on the Islamic world and early kind of money, capital and concepts of capital, kind of dating back as far as the 8th century and so on and so forth. So there's, you know, quite a lot within that that can give you a kind of, as you say, a money form and certain pools of wage labor to pull from within certain kinds of developed societies. Some people would argue that that could have been even like not Banerjee, but other people would argue that you could even potentially trace that back to Shumeria, right. So I don't think that stacks because, like money existing and markets existing on their own kind of, don't kind of really cut the mustard in that respect. Money capitalists have had various different influences but in terms of like, and have to a certain extent organized certain elements of production in earlier periods as well. But in order to kind of look at what marxists and I think marx was getting out with the kind of industrial capitalist society which is, I think, the thing that we're talking about, I think there's like a few features that you need to see emerge, one of which is kind of the. It becomes the structuring logic not only of, like the economy in a kind of blank sense, the kind of capital relation, the wage-labor relation and the purchase of the capitalist owning the means of production and so on and so forth, the stuff we all kind of know from Capital Volume 1 and 2 and 3, obviously, but the kind of core relation kind of. That requires not only that, becoming kind of structuring the economy in like an abstract sense, but then also in a real sense. It has to structure space and it has to begin to structure time in quite decisive ways as well in terms of the distribution and settlement patterns of people.

Prolekult Films: 11:23

The kind of development we kind of see of the ways the functions of the countryside and the city is different kind of productive and resource centers, essentially, and different kinds of market relations and the push for a world market. That process kind of begins in a bit of a haze between the 12th and 13th century in britain, I would say so that would be kind of where I date this transformation really beginning in britain and that's due to kind of the decay of feudal relation feudal relations it's an inelegant word but we'll use it as shorthand kind of feudal relations. In Britain that's kind of already degraded to the extent that like wage labour becomes more increasingly attractive and market-orientated sheep farming becomes particularly attractive for landlords and newly kind of rising capitalist classes within Britain, obviously aided by the Reformation and the unification of England at least into a single market, the largest in the world at that point. And so all of those things mark a massive change in space as we see the kind of clearance processes begin in that period, people being forced off the land, increasing concentration in large villages and cities and towns, and at the same time we kind of see the transformation of the countryside rapidly kind of happening from those clearances and kind of massive appeal to the world market for kind of sheep, wool, different kind of cotton goods and so on and so forth start to form in that time and that really structures space and things in a very different way and the economy in a different way through that spatial reorganisation.

Prolekult Films: 13:01

And so you've got that kind of period and I'd say that's something you could date as the beginning of capitalism as a process in England, as an industrial capitalism as a process. There's been other events like in Rome. What I would say is you could potentially see the ingredients for that process to begin, but it didn't congeal in the same way that we saw, so it didn't actually come to fruition, even the elements leading toward it were possible. And the reason it didn't come to fruition is partially agricultural collapse, partially a number of other factors to do with political and economic problems within the empire. So I would say the classical explanation of which Marx provides, that it begins around the 12th, 13th century in England, holds up, but with the useful challenges from people like Banaji which make us think more about how these things unfold as processes. So dating becomes a bit sketchy because we are talking about, like really social things that are quite hard to pin down.

C. Derick Varn: 13:54

In that respect, yeah, which I guess, sorry, trotskyist and vulgar stalinist. We can't just start capitalism with the bourgeois revolutions, um, nor so, which it's actually kind of interesting that marxists would try to do that. Uh, in so much that we kind of know, you can't talk about that in the emergence of communism like we we can clearly see, and talking about something in the future that, uh, that we can't fully articulate, that, um, the exact moment of transition is not going to be probably clear ever, um and um. But you can kind of tell in the long duray of the process, right, I mean, we talk about the capitalization of the world. That's like a 500 year process and you know, arguably, getting rid of all forms of regime has never completely happened, even in the capitalist world. And I mean again your country's proof of that Um, but also that that leads to some interesting implications for trying to figure out all this environmental degradation. Cause it's not, it's not like large tributary societies that use the word for Samira I mean that I don't always love, but I think it'll be clarifying here Like the Islamicate world are some of the Chinese empires. It's not like that those societies weren't resource intensive either.

C. Derick Varn: 15:26

But two things that you notice, one, statistical, and I admit, when we start talking about GDP growth before the 17th century, it's a little bit sketchy, but there does seem to be a massive increase in productivity that is measurable between the 14th and 17th century and that's different from what was going on in, say, a lot of these tributary societies. And one of the ways you know that is even in capitalist societies. A whole lot of technological innovation comes from war, something that I actually wish Marx had written more about. But what we see prior to capitalism is almost all technological innovation comes from war, um, and growth is tied intimately to direct land conquest, right, um, and and it's, and it's very short-lived it. Those gains don't last very long. You burn through them pretty quickly, because then you have to maintain what you've acquired and blah, blah, blah, blah, um, capitalism does seem to fundamentally change that statistically, uh.

C. Derick Varn: 16:46

But the other thing is so you have that and that you see massive growth, and then you see a change in what societies are investing their surplus into. Are they investing them into certain forms of status consumption? Well, you still see that in their capitalism, but it used to be a large, a larger part of the gift economy of a lot of these societies and do you see them in reinvesting in war? And it's not like capitalists don't reinvest in war, they reinvest in tournament war. But, like I said, if you were to compare Britain to, say, new Spain and I think both Banerjee and Meekins Woods writes about this pretty well you see that New Spain doesn't have the productivity growth that the English colonies does because they're investing almost everything into warfare extraction and that changes the nature of what's going on quite a bit and I suspect at first that seems liberatory. I mean, what do you make of that? Do you agree with those distinctions?

Prolekult Films: 17:54

even In terms of the kind of technological development through war and the kind of relation of capitalism relative to prior societies and that kind of transformation. Yeah, so capitalism does develop technology through war, as you kind of said, but it does it in other ways as well which are much more kind of tied into broader social processes. So there's one part in the film where you really go into the development of steam and how that played into various different resource kind of problems well, not resource problems but spatial problems within the structuring of the kind of new work economy and how it was kind of directly kind of deployed as malm rights in fossil capital in order to concentrate workers and to dictate the number of hours that they would work and so on and so forth, which is not something that you would see a prime mover like explicitly developed for in, say, rome, which where there were water wheels, for example, in rome the water wheel is a roman technology as far as we are aware of it, but um, that also well, earlier as well. But um, that also kind of is tied in, it's not tied into kind of warfare extraction, but it's also not developed like consciously in a labor management solution, right, um. So there's kind of distinctions in terms of those things and once you've kind of got an understanding as britain's capitalists did in the term of steam and probably earlier and definitely earlier as well that you can deploy these kind of mechanizations as weapons to discipline workers and things like that, that provides another impulse to technological growth that I don't think was as present in like tributary societies or like earlier empires and things like that.

Prolekult Films: 19:27

So I think that's true, um, and I also think the role that war plays differs under capitalism in terms of building economic spheres of influence. Certainly since the transition to kind of economic imperialism you've been able to do that without having to take on the direct responsibility of managing the population as well. Right, like you've been able to sap the wealth of something without having to occupy or directly kind of do it because of the ubiquity of the world market, and I think that kind of does distill that kind of problem in some ways. I think kind of the broader point you're trying to get at in terms of kind of the different destructive impulses in prior societies was like a really big, like clear distillation of that kind of destructive impulse within a form of political economy, but in terms of human and non-human nature as well and kind of how these systems of extraction and things have predated capitalism and how different ecological problems have predated capitalism is a really interesting thing.

Prolekult Films: 20:26

Because in taking on the argument that the kind of Anthropocene concept, the idea that all human activity creates destruction of nature and degradation of the environment, in critiquing that I think it's crucial not to do which what I see a lot of kind of cruder Marxist arguments against the kind of Anthropocene concept do, which is say, like capitalism is unique in that it's constantly causes ecocide, whereas other systems of production didn't do that and then focused primarily on kind of restorative plant kind of practices in indigenous cultures which are valuable and worth understanding but are not, like true of all societies.

Prolekult Films: 21:04

In human history. Ecocide very definitely happened in like as far back as the megafaunal extinctions, right, but the character of it and the scope of it is different, in a similar way that we would say that the kind of character and scope and importance of war and technological development through war is different under these kind of forms of economic logic and so on and so forth, and so that produces really different results. So I think there's kind of a parallel to that in terms of like that kind of point about war and kind of drawing out into that kind of more ecological devastation, if that, if you kind of follow that yeah, I can follow that, hopefully my listeners can.

C. Derick Varn: 21:42

But it's important, I think, to kind of establish, because I do think every now and then Marxist and especially anarchist are given towards a romanticization of indigenous societies, as if there weren't ecological collapses in like Mesoamerica or in Europe, the pre-capitalism. But I do think it's interesting. You know, one of the tells to me I read a lot of complexity theory. I'm a big fan of Joseph Tainter, but Joseph Tainter doesn't really understand Marx or capitalism very well. And there's a focus on quote, global industrial society. And I have another friend who's like, oh, capitalism doesn't exist, global industrial society exists. And I tried to figure out what distinction they were trying to make with that. Um, because from my mind, the logics of capitalism inevitably lead to global industrial society. So you know what's the work being done there? I think one of the works being done there and I actually caught it reading actually reactionary, from the early 20th century in chile, uh, uh, carlos gomez de villa. And um, he actually says, uh, industrial society is the thing ruining, uh, the world. And he in, and he, he goes into saying, because there's, because both capitalism and communism are industrial societies. So I was like, oh, that's the work being done here.

C. Derick Varn: 23:18

It's trying to say that it's a technological problem that human beings have placed on ourselves, and that's what's doing it, and not a logic problem, so that you can say that any society that use these technologies, such as the ussr, uh, would have had almost identical results, and I think that's interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 23:42

That's a separate problem from the problem you identified, uh, in talking about the anthropocene, but I think it's. I think it's what's going on with this talk of industrial society. So your work, particularly in that documentary, that makes it clear that the need to manage the workers is driving this as much as efficiency is. So there's a social relation issue at the heart here, not just a technological one, and that the technology being aimed at what it is aimed for, which is the valorization of surplus through the valorization of abstract labor, accounting, labor time, etc. This is, um, something unique to capitalism, which leads to the logics that make the industrial problem what it is is. Is that a fair statement of you know your argument and putting it in the context when people use things like oh, we don't mean capitalism, we mean industrial society, etc. Etc.

Prolekult Films: 24:44

Etc yeah, so, like the argument is that the kind of. I mean, there's two arguments kind of inevitably bound up together. One is that, yeah, you're quite correct that it's the relations and the way that these things are structured that gives rise to the ecological devastation. So there's kind of numerous different ways to kind of look at that, relative to kind of different earlier societies which are useful to kind of illustrate it. So the big division that Paul Burkett famously makes in Marx and Nature is that there are use value and Marx makes this distinction as well in Volume 2 of Capital there are societies which produce use values and there are societies that produce exchange values, and those dominate in kind of logics, feed into each other in different ways and fundamentally, when exchange value production is dominant and becoming dominant, the core thing is the production of wage labor, and that requires very unique spatial relations in relation to use value societies, because those were all primarily agrarian societies, whereas societies premised on exchange value tend to be premised on industrialization and concentration of populations. Concentration of populations, right, and so you could say it's industrial society, but then you're kind of missing what like that. What I would argue is the cause of industrial society, which is this valorization of of kind of commodities through the extra exploitation of human labor, with concentration, industrialization, um, and and all the kind of resource extraction, speed of speed of exchange, reliance of exchange, is there to fuel happening right. It arises as a way of extracting the secret power that Marx talks about, the labor power as the commodity form of labor and structuring a society around that and structuring it around the idea that you must have access to these things. Like labor power means you need people concentrated in space. You need them to be taken away from the land. Land has to be farmed in monocrops, land has to be farmed in huge sheep herds. Food eventually needs to be imported. In advanced capitalist countries, particularly England's a really stark example of that. By the end of the 1800s it's around 80% reliant on the rest of the world for bread. At the start of the 1800s it was like 10% of the society used imported grain for bread and things like that. So this development of this spatial logic spreads and entails that ecological devastation, whereas kind of earlier societies didn't have that To go to kind of the communism and kind of industrialization process. This is something that's really.

Prolekult Films: 27:14

People wrestle with it in the eco socialist tendency in various different ways, uh, through the kind of critique of um needing kind of uh kind of a critique of a Promethean Marx is the way that the kind of theoretical dispute kind of comes around.

Prolekult Films: 27:27

Um, and then you have like some coverage of things like which try to preserve the Soviet union, particularly from the monthly review tendency who like focus on ecology development within the late Soviet Union particularly, but also like conservation under Lenin and things like that to try and preserve it as an ecologically viable society, was there and the logic behind it was that we need more of a proletariat because we're not developed enough.

Prolekult Films: 27:55

Right, which ended up, I think, recreating that concentration dynamic in the soviet union and a huge amount of kind of other socialist experiments. That's not always the case and there are kind of different experiments to look at, particularly cuba, where diffusion of population has played more of a role, particularly like reintegration of kind of land policy into that kind of process and things like that. But that is I can kind of see why people are going for with the industrialization thing, but I think that's a matter of did we kind of fully throw off the form of capital? Was that a world market question? Was that an internal economy question. All of those things are like I would say no, we didn't, but like there was attempts, but it didn't manage to.

C. Derick Varn: 28:36

Yeah, that my read is is is also that I I'm hesitant to call the ussr state capitalism because it frankly didn't seem that coherent. Um, but the the idea that it got to any of its own criterion of what socialism was seems pretty much of a stretch. I mean, they would declare it, you know, every now and then, but uh, it didn't seem to actually happen. And you know, uh, cuba is a good example. I think, uh, china there in the collective period is a good example. And Cuba is a good example.

C. Derick Varn: 29:19

I think China during the collective period is a good example, that's when they're actively trying to undo these concentrations of human capital which I think people miss. About the immediate post-cultural revolution, part of the collective period of the intellectuals wasn't just, or even primarily, to punish the intellectuals, it was to spread out knowledge bases to the peasants, so basically ending organic capital concentration of the intellect. You know, which is interesting, because that kind of concentration of human capital actually probably does predate capitalism. Nonetheless, I mean, it's, it's, it's not something we've done much and in the case of Cuba, it seems like they've done it because they had to, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 30:03

Similarly, you know, DPRK like, yeah, so it's, it's making a virtue of necessity, but it is interesting. Cuba is very interesting on a lot of these questions, um, so, uh, you spend a lot of time going into also how much of this devastation is, um, in an interesting part of capital, because we have the obvious capital land degradation. But then there's all this black and gray market capitalism that is still required for capitalism to work, and you talk about that in the mining trades in Brazil a good bit. I mean, that's a good portion of the documentary, which is also important because it gets us focusing on the mass extinction as not just a function of climate change, which is just one element of it. So would you like to talk about the informal sector and its role in both capitalism and environmental degradation? Yeah, sure.

Prolekult Films: 31:04

So the kind of way to understand mining is as the spearhead of a frontier, I think particularly illegal and artisanal mining. That kind of leads you down a number of different roads. So to kind of explain what I mean here. So we have in the property of there's a theoretical premise and then we can kind of get onto the detail, the theoretical premise being that as capital expands, what it requires fundamentally, once everything else is said and done with however much level of kind of industrialization, it requires more labor, right, it always requires more labor and it requires more creation of landless workers who have nothing to do but sell their labor power as a commodity in order to extract surplus value from it. And so when we get to an agriculture, when we get to a frontier of something where there are still extant other forms of production and other ways of managing it, they are integrated into capitalism. In certain ways there are certain reliances on market economies, now that even tribal societies experience not all of them, but that is quite common. And obviously you still have reserves which are managed by states which then integrate these kind of economies more and more and so on and so forth. But mining plays the kind of arrow tip of the kind of Amazonian frontier very definitely, and it does so, and illegal mining does, in a number of different ways. Firstly, it does so kind of spatially, because if it's illegal you're wanting to be kind of hidden from the state police and things like that who, whilst not always that effective, do do kind of hidden from the state police and things like that who, whilst not always that effective, do do kind of symbolic crackdowns. Quite a lot that has picked up a lot under Lula, but there's some problems with kind of in Brazil but there's some problems with strikes in the Environmental Protection Agency over insufficient funds and things that we've seen over the last year. It's not going smoothly but it does still happen and it is still a threat to illegal miners. So they want to be hidden, they want to go furthest into the canopy. They'll do that by going either along a navigable river or through a road, already existing road network, and then going further in and clearing new roads that we that would there would like small, hidden roads, dirt tracks that would go to the mine, and the reason that they can do that is so successfully. The reason that's so ecologically problematic and why it serves as a frontier kind of element is because roads then provide new spaces for other industries to open up. If you gain access, then you can gain further access to the territories with less difficulty once heavy machinery has already been transported there. So you kind of have that kind of spatial dynamic.

Prolekult Films: 33:33

Economically this is incentivized by huge amounts of drug production in the Amazon rainforest, and gold provides. Illegal gold mining is, while still illegal, the product is much easier to launder funds legally through than it is kind of narcotics or kind of these different other trades which are harder to launder money directly through. And so it plays a massive, massive role at gold mining particularly, but also different rare earth metal mining, certain types of oil extraction and so on and so forth play a really easy role of laundering drug-fueled money from gangs and so on and so forth, and that is a really powerful device. So I think it's Columbia is now a bigger producer of gold than it is of narcotics, despite being one of the largest producers in the world and so on. And so that kind of provides an immediate kind of space to operate in for people who are already engaged in criminal activity which, whilst this mining activity is illegal, it's much safer for their profits and so on and so forth than the drugs traders. Um, so that gives it kind of two kind of roles in expanding both kind of black market capital but then also expanding the existing amazonian frontier which, once you've got the mines kind of then have deforestation kind of coming in.

Prolekult Films: 34:52

Small scale agriculture normally follows that to a certain degree Subsistence farmers trying to eke out a living, having been dispossessed somewhere else, or kind of the indigenous populations will be there and that will slowly be kind of monetized. And then you have kind of larger scale agriculture moving in as land price speculation kicks in and it becomes a viable asset to speculate upon primarily as well as now secure huge agribusiness profits. So mining kind of plays this really powerful role in kind of the kind of capital logic as it unfolds across the frontier, not just because of those reasons. But then we add in another reason which is we have these extinct populations of indigenous peoples, small peasants who still own parts of their lands and so on and so forth, who illegal gold mines are really really useful for bigger capital because they can dispossess these people really directly and violently at very low cost and then also kind of suck them into the gold mining kind of process itself. So a kind of crucial example of this that we highlight in the film is the Yanomami genocide, which has there's like huge amounts of disease implicated in this. But kind of the real thrust to that comes with a gold rush in the 80s which then propels that region, the Yanomami territories, which then propels that region, the Annamami territories, which are on the border of Brazil and Venezuela.

Prolekult Films: 36:14

In the Brazil side of that border they kind of see a huge influx of gold mining gangs in that period and that leads to a lot of kind of breakdown, huge environmental degradation, lots of people forced off their land. Lots of kind of health problems begin to creep up from mercury poisoning particularly, but also from arsenic poisoning, certain kinds of cyanide poisoning. Those kind of things get in the water systems and the topsoils. And because the Amazon is particularly good at cycling walkers, that's water, that's one of its main functions as an ecosystem globally, it really really cycles that through whole populations and it's not easy to deal with those problems once they've formed and that leads to a lot of people not being able to live on their lands, concentration in large rural villages in the Amazon, which then also damages subsistence crops potentials. So you have direct violence of gangs attacking villages to try and seize this kind of land from them to open new mines. Then you also have the ecological impact, which further corrals people together and then leaves them deprived of their subsistence, and so that's a huge dynamic in terms of how this all plays out. And then, within all of that as well, you have the mass extinction effect, which further damages subsistence capacity in an area as well, over hunting, when people are concentrated in small villages where previously they were spelled out, spread out. That's one factor, but then also poisoning of the ecosystem through that steam cycle, through fish. Carnivorous fish is the main staple diet across the entire amazonian region and it's something like 85 percent of the main fish that is eaten is like infected with mercury poisoning, um, and so you get this kind of lowering amount of capacity, which renders people reliant on the market as well.

Prolekult Films: 38:02

So the market follows following this devastation into these areas because of the various different environmental effects, social effects and things like that are brought with these illegal mines and they play a huge number of purposes for a lot of different actors within that, because a lot of this can then be sold on to legal companies once it's attained a gold certificate, which is something you can fake quite easily, and then gets bought up and brought into the Royal Canadian Mint, for example, at the end of that pipeline.

Prolekult Films: 38:31

So there's a huge, oh one example of pipeline. So there's a huge one example of that. So there's a huge kind of pipeline into the legal sector which allows this money to be laundered and allows these criminal forces to gain kind of state level powers as well in certain instances. And then you also have labour discipline, which can be allowed to be a lot more violent when you have desperate people who you've already dispossessed, who are reliant on the market. You have some money, they'll come to you for work eventually, um, you can traffic people in in these kind of illegal circumstances, where they won't as well, um, and then deploy brutal violence and debt traps against them in order to keep them enslaved to the thing that has dispossessed them ultimately.

C. Derick Varn: 39:09

So yeah, that's kind of a summary well, I mean, the role of law in in capitalism is on the left, tends to be, uh, either valorized purely as a protection of property, which is fair enough but doesn't actually tell you that much, or on like the more you know, heterodox in quotations, keynesian and MMT circles about the establishment of communities of credit and debt, but the idea that it is a primary discipliner of the workforce, both by removing I mean in the States, it's clearly a way to remove large parts of the unemployed, and that's part of what led to the drug war in the first place. Today we seem to be moving against the drug war and more just actually just jailing homeless people directly. Is that for the past 20 or 30 years? Because there's an exemption in the 13th Amendment on slavery? Basically slave prisoners are allowed, although most states don't actually do that. They compensate them on pennies, on the dollar, and it's currently, right now being used. Uh, since we seem to lack, um a migrant force. This is subject, that is, subject to sub minimum wage laws. Uh that we are now putting a lot of uh uh convicts into those jobs, like they get work released to go work on farms and whatnot.

C. Derick Varn: 40:52

Um the the way the black and gray market plays into the, the. The quote official market and capitalism is is interesting to me because it explains something that actually marx really doesn't explain um why the lumpen proletariat, lumpenbourgeoisie are kept around. Because Marx has a political theory for that, but his economic theory is that they basically exist because they shouldn't exist. They're the quote dregs of the former classes. But one thing we've learned from watching development in Latin America with indigenous people in Africa, particularly in South Africa and Z? Uh zimbabwe, former rhodesia, is that in a lot of these relatively lush agrarian and?

C. Derick Varn: 41:38

Uh pastoral societies, um, it wasn't easy to get people to work, nor is it a, nor is it a step up in in in life framework. Like forcing people into agriculture is hard enough, but forcing people in the capitalist agriculture and capitalist mining operations is even harder. Um, and the role of law and conquest is very important to that, and I think sometimes marxists don't focus on that enough, uh, partly because I think there's a tendency to valorize capital as a mostly positive force against prior forms of society, which I think is true. Marx really did think that, but I I think we give a lot of people a pass when we do that. What do you make about that?

Prolekult Films: 42:21

I mean, I agree and I think that actually that problem actually goes back to capital Right. So if we look at kind of the last section of capital, so-called primitive accumulation, marx discusses the enclosures in Britain from 13th century and so on and so forth and he mentions that there are previously anti-enclosure laws, but he doesn't really mention much about them. He just sort of notes that that was a thing and then there was a transition and what we kind of have to make of that right. Like there were anti-enclosure laws and I I can't remember the statistic but within, like I think it was a few months after the laws were passed, there was some degree of census keeping trying to get an idea of how many times it had been broken by early capitalist farmers and their kind of gangs to try and throw, literally throw peasants off their land and get rid of villages and things like that, against the law of the state. That was the vital component, not only because it enabled the direct land theft but then also because of this disciplinarian device that this direct violence plays over generations on dispossessed populations and this kind of Marx does say that there's like a torturing process in terms of labour discipline in this period and I think that's accurate.

Prolekult Films: 43:31

But he proofs it exclusively through pro-enclosure legislation, whereas I think it actually begins more with this illegal criminal element which is trying to expand an existing frontier in our present case, or in that case is breaking the law of like feudal society in order to begin to create a market in mass markets and sheep wool and labor power, and that criminal element plays a really key role, so like it's not just forcing people into these things as well, I think it plays a role in restructuring whole communities around them. That enable ways for, from the criminal kind of bourgeois perspective, the lumpenbourgeois perspective, from the criminal kind of bourgeois perspective, the lumpen bourgeois perspective, it kind of allows ways for their illegal capital to enter into the kind of legal market and become legal in a present context right and to amass kind of bigger accumulations so that they can then one day kind of get out of this trade and become like a legal capitalist, and allows that kind of process of class formation on both sides to really kind of set in and become really heavy. Not a lot of them won't want to abandon their illegal investments at the same time. They'll keep those, but it allows greater power over kind of twisting the arm of legislators and so on and so forth, which will allow them in some better business opportunities further down the line.

Prolekult Films: 44:45

And so it plays a structuring device, not only kind of in incorporating new labour, in dispossessing kind of areas, in getting areas that what aren't considered part of an economy, like the brazilian rainforest wasn't until the sort of development programs of the 70s and the 80s really from the military government there kind of bring it into the sphere. Um, this gangsterism allows that process to proceed much more rapidly once it's set in and is a kind of a cornerstone. And you could even go back to the conquistadors right and say like, well, these are mercenaries who hire each other and then go off and conquer or loot and seize property and seize people. And if we look back far back, that's a proto-capitalist relationship that's emerging through what would in another context be considered criminality what would in another context be considered criminality Right.

C. Derick Varn: 45:34

I think we also see this with questionable legal criminality, like the piracy and the beginnings of massive pirate empires in the 14th century, which seems to be pretty crucial to the establishment of settler colonies in the Americas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of that stuff wasn't entirely legal. Some of it was, some of it was even state-granted monopoly, but not all of it was. And then you have these weird gray sectors like explorer privateers and whatnot. And I do think we can maybe fault Marx a little bit for relying on official sources so much, but I don't know how he would have done otherwise, to be fair to him. But we don't have an excuse not to incorporate that stuff. We know much more about it.

Prolekult Films: 46:26

Yeah, precisely, it's not necessarily Faulting Marx or not faulting Marx is somewhat not the point in kind of all these circumstances, which is perhaps something that could arise fruitfully in terms of when we get around to eco-socialist kind of debates and things like that. That element isn't so interesting to me is like we have the information now we can expand the logic, we can see that there are ways in which people are pulled in through different structures than perhaps capital allows us to see, even though it still allows us to understand what logics they're feeding into. And I think that's the really kind of important part for me In that kind of gang relation, in that kind of like violent relation, that kind of dispossession relation and the kind of direct brutal discipline of the labour force as well. And through these things I think that kind of there's also a change in terms of how we related to nature that emerges through those processes as well, where we are no longer talking about something that is like owned in a kind of direct sense is something that needs to be maintained.

Prolekult Films: 47:32

These are things that when, particularly when criminally kind of procured, no one's thinking I'm going to own the same. No, no, illegal gold miner is thinking like capitalist is thinking I'm going to own the same set of illegal gold mines in 30 years time, right, no one's thinking that they're thinking are short-term, really rapid resource extraction elements and that I can do that with a brutal disciplining and with very little cost to me, because I can discard these people when I'm done and that's a really kind of direct relationship that I think does change the way in which people certainly the way in which prior populations would have adapted to their environments, the way in which people, certainly the way in which prior populations would have adapted to their environments, but certainly now, also changes.

C. Derick Varn: 48:20

The mentality that capitalists have is one source of that thinking. Well, that seems to be pretty crucial To get into what this implies. It's kind of devastating and I think there's a darker underbelly in it. One thing that I will say is that today, you know, the only reason I mentioned the, the Marx thing. I also kind of find it like asinine to to be like, oh, we must condemn Marx because he got one fact wrong in a book, uh, that was written to you know, um, almost 200 years ago.

C. Derick Varn: 48:57

Um, I don't do that to darwin, but the other thing I would say and maybe this is something to think about, uh a bit is that there does seem to be a kind of socialism emerging, uh, that that I think it's not even just bright green socialism, it's kind of a, a re-industrialization smokestacks socialism, um, which I think is a is an interesting tendency. I don't know if it exists in Britain the way it does in the U S, um, which it's not a major tendency in the U S, because no socialist tendency is a major tendency in the U S, but um, it is. It is there, um, and they often use the, the valorization parts of, of Marx own capital, to justify it Like, oh, you know, all the sacrifice will be redeemed by the productive forces. Basically, I think your view makes that that easy. Uh, teleology a lot harder to get behind, right? Like, um, we, we do have to look at, okay, like, when is there a point of no return to productive forces, development and the cost of it? Uh, and uh, is it always good, you know? Um, and that leads us to a lot of debates within socialism today around the eco-socialist questions.

C. Derick Varn: 50:22

I spent a lot of time discussing it. I've had, I haven't had kohei saito on yet. Um, maybe I'll ask him I'm probably too small to get him since the atlantic interviews but um, uh, I actually find Saito somewhat frustratingly beside the point, because it's basically making all of eco-socialism a Marxiological question and one that is on not no grounds. Uh, as I think uh, your, your uh stuff on this and your videos on this actually make clear. But I think Paul Burkett puts it on sounder grounds and me trying to find you're, you're uh stuff on this and your videos on this actually make clear.

C. Derick Varn: 50:52

But I think Paul Burkett puts it on sounder grounds and me trying to find you know footnotes on lie big to say that capital is really just about uh, the, the impossibility of, of, of uh, constant growth, um, and not just in the capitalist sense of that term, um, and not just in the capitalist sense of that term. But I often find with the exception of, maybe, john Bellamy Foster, someone I don't always agree with, I tend to have issues with the monthly review tendency but that both sides of this debate miss the point. Sometimes they actually do get the point but they're not articulating it towards each other. I mean what I've been very frustrated with the, with the uh, with, like the bright green, versus degrowth, eco-socialism, which seems to be just a, a slightly more refined version of the old primitivist versus uh productive forces, socialist debates, uh, 20, 30, 40 years ago, um, what do you make about that in light of your own research on this problem?

Prolekult Films: 51:52

So I think there's a few different problems. So one thing I do think is that the argument here follows it follows the dominant logic of the Promethean Marx argument, whether it's pro or against the Promethean Marx interpretation and by Promethean we mean the development of productive forces kind of argument that it all kind of hinges on that remark in the preface. Ultimately right, that one day the means of production will develop to such a certain extent that the relations of production will not be able to contain them and therefore capitalism will end and socialism will burst into the future. That's the kind of bit from these fetters on the productive forces that the relations of production put upon them. Then communism becomes a necessary historical impulse in order to overthrow capitalism and further develop the means of production, which I don't think the Promethean Marx interpretation of that is correct, that we build bigger and bigger machines until, like capitalism, can't anymore and then we have to do socialism to build the next bigger and better machine. But I also think that arguing around that principle, as the eco-modernist, the kind of or degrowth tendencies do, is really asinine. On the one hand it doesn't really get us anywhere in terms of strategy. It doesn't get us anywhere in terms of the relations which could do those things, and I'm saying that in the knowledge that there are people who have attempted that and are attempting that. But I don't think we can do that outside of very specific social movements or incidents of social movements, individual achievements, without resorting to an abstract movement of movement theories or a kind of religiosity in the belief of the industrial proletariat to somehow make a green society, when it conquers power, right.

Prolekult Films: 53:44

And so I think a lot of this kind of technical debate actually edges back to what I was talking about at the start and is in some ways a reaction to the way that this knowledge is framed. We're talking in very metrical terms when we talk about whether we want better industrialisation or kind of a degrowth strategy which will have certain types of reduction of consumerism and presumably often not always, but generally preferred some degree of kind of like rewilding agriculture or agroecology or something like that, implicated in a new development structure. And I think that that kind of argument it tends to different technical developments that we can see arising within capitalism, like renewable, so-called renewable energy or kind of. And I would say that agroecology is actually a new thing rather than a reclaimed form of knowledge that's being reapplied. I think we're doing a new form of plant science and things like that with that kind of form, but it is a very limited tendency. These are very limited tendencies under capitalism.

Prolekult Films: 54:47

In many ways, renewable energy is a lot further forward than agroecological approaches as we would understand them as a specific kind of modern scientific understanding of renewable agricultural practices and all of these kind of things. They are interesting but they don't get to the core question of what social relations could enable either of those things or what social relations are really structuring their development as they are. And those are the more interesting questions, right, because, like, say the, say, the degrowth argument, um, and I I'm going for the degrowth argument because I'm, in some ways, I'm more sympathetic to some of their arguments. Even though I think that it's somewhat, I still think we're kind of missing the point. Um, you can see this argument that, um, we need to adopt these rewilding techniques that capitalism has developed or have been developed under capitalism.

Prolekult Films: 55:38

We need to adopt these technical things, but then very little discussion of like what a social transformation to do that would look like, because you're going to need a lot more labor intensivity on the land, you're going to need a lot more kind of like on the land. You're going to need a lot more kind of populations moving out of cities which they're not doing, and those kind of dynamics really, really need to be in place. And how to create that social transformation would be the real question there. Even if you set on that as a desirable thing, let alone, how do you build a popular movement against ecological devastation which is abstracted and fragmented? And so I think that those are the kind of it's a critical impasse that argues around a developmental point, that ascribes a future development which we can't command, rather than one that looks at the social question and goes this is the determining factor, and I think that's how those debates are structured.

C. Derick Varn: 56:28

Yeah, how do we incentivize this other than, I don't know, like thinking that you have a small cadre of uh of like dedicated etro socialist, leninist forcing everyone to move out to the countryside by gunpoint which wouldn't last very long, just to be quite frank, like they would get killed pretty quickly. Um, so it's, it's just, uh, it's one of those things when I'm like, even if I agree with you, I have no idea how I would do what you want me to do, like Would you get close? There are some deep growth groups who seem to try to answer that question, but usually, when they do, I'm actually even more unsatisfied. So, because I'm like, oh, so you want us to somehow get 80% of the world population to do massive pre-agricultural technology agriculture and you also don't think that's going to lead to a mass human population die off, like that's? I mean, it's not primitivism, but it's not that, far from it. But conversely, you know, um, when I talk to some of the people who are on the more great, bright green side, they basically seem to be arguing.

C. Derick Varn: 57:45

I don't think this is true of matt hoover. I do think it might be true of lee phill Phillips, on some of those other people that you know, we just need something like to assume you know capitalist technologies because we can do it right now pass them, pass some regulation, and on the road to socialism we shall go. And that just seems. Even though they're focusing on the labor movement as a way, this has happened in the past quite frankly they're also focusing on an industrial labor movement that doesn't exist and develop capital in the same way that in the 1950s, and you can't make it so right like it's. It's just not going to happen again in that way. Um, and they're not dealing with the differences in the needs of organic capital composition are the amount of automation, etc. Etc.

Prolekult Films: 58:33

Etc I think hubris more honest than that on than phillips. I mean, I've talked with matt before and I had him and hi harren um to debate this on on our podcast a while ago and like what was interesting is that the fundamental premise that I've kind of argued both were kind of coming at it from like matt from an eco-modernist kind of generalized perspective and kai from a kind of degrowth perspective and what was really interesting to me is that they both agreed with the premise that this is kind of a dead argument that's not going anywhere, but then still hold that argument. It's. It's a really interesting dynamic. Um, but I think the kind of both of these, ultimately both of these tendencies are ultimately different forms of technical fetish, and I think that's the only way I can come to think about them is that in order to take either of them seriously, we have to think that the socialist response to the climate crisis or the extinction crisis has to become in some kind of development program or a party program with very technical kind of elements, rather than the development of new kind of ways of engaging with each other in a societal sense. That would be the kind of development program that would decide the resource sense Right and dealing with the world as it is in that circumstance and allowing people to democratically organize and expand that, or even kind of like the basis for that in a policy. That I think would be much more instructive, because it's the thing that would allow you to do either of those things in the long run if they prove technically viable, which is not something we can see before we start doing them, unfortunately.

Prolekult Films: 1:00:09

Unfortunately, like is land nationalisation right?

Prolekult Films: 1:00:14

The struggle would be for land reforms and how we manage that initially, because that's the basis upon which a national ecological society could begin to be organised in any sense, and you need to start doing that building block in order to build up to internationalist struggle, for example.

Prolekult Films: 1:00:32

And without that kind of concretization or a process or a strategy toward those things, I think what we end up doing is skipping over the fact that it's people. We want a mass democratic society. If we want socialism in some form, whether it's like a Soviet-style democracy or some other kind of form of mass participative democracy and ownership of production, we would want that element, and so to decide how the technical solutions and the kind of ecological solutions are going to work in advance is to set yourself up for failure and to do things like the lesson of the Bolshevik Revolution. They committed to 100% employment and things like that, which are absurd kind of commitments prior to having done a revolution. And how you actually manage that then becomes a huge problem, because otherwise you're kind of going against the party program which has gotten you there. Um, and that's assuming a huge amount of like importance could be granted to either of these tendencies and get them to that kind of end game scenario, which I don't think it could, because most of them subsist in the academic left.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:34

Right. This is actually a very important thing to talk about. I am reminded of Robert Kurz. Do you know Robert Kurz, the Black Book of.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:46

Capitalism. Oh yeah, value, not value form critic. Value critique uh, he's not very well read in the united states, but he talked and he kind of actually was a pretty harsh on marx and even though he was using marx's work and consider it fundamental to his own, uh for, for not taking marx's own advice about not trying to spell out, um, what the conceptual ontologies might need to be, uh, before a revolutionary society uh emerges, and he actually talks about that in the crisis of globalization in 2005, that, yeah, yeah, you see capitalists and other people flirting with the end of the nation state, but they're probably going to double down on it, which he was right about. Um, because the, the conceptual frameworks can't be articulated until you're already there. Right, it's just, there's no way, there's no.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:45

I mean, if you're going to try to argue that we can, that we can pre-invent social forms before we've actually started to implement them, or at least explain them, then You're you're basically arguing that we should be able to invent something conceptually before we've invented it conceptually. You know what I mean. Like, does that make sense? Like, if I could describe a wheel wheel, I've invented a wheel yeah, yeah, precisely yeah, um.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:18

So yeah, I do think. I do sort of think part of the problem with both the growth and degrowth is they're trying like there. There's a fundamental lack of vision of what this kind of change would actually require, and sometimes I'm like it's because we also don't understand how different the past really was either right, that's you know 100 and like yeah, sorry, go ahead yeah, no, no.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:41

I mean, the naturalization of the current condition is read back, you know, particularly in libertarian circles, but it's read back pretty much forever and I think, yes, there's a certain continuity of the human being, since we've had language, but other time periods are radically different.

Prolekult Films: 1:04:01

And the way they consider social change is radically different and this kind of ties these things together in a huge number of ways. Because so far I guess we've kind of ties these things together in like a huge number of ways. Because, like so far I guess, we've kind of discussed around the the problems of understanding like different time scales in relation to two different like objects of long duration which would be a mass, mass extinction modes of production and kind of how those things line up and how they work and integrate with each other. Then we've also discussed kind of around um, like mining and the actual concrete processes of dispossession and things like that. But at the start we were kind of also kind of trying to get at the way we historicize this mass extinction and how we think about it. Um, and I think when we're thinking about that there's there's a lot of different examples of ecological change in human society and how that's been engendered and attended and through a social relation between humanity and non-human nature. And like understanding that process as not something like that it can be expressed in an embodiment of a machine, it can be expressed in embodiment of a tool, is something that we argue right and that that plays into this technical fetish. There's one way of getting around that, which is the social constructivist kind of approach to machinery or technology, which is useful, but only insofar as you can fit that into a context that's more broadly established. And so when we're reading back on something like the megafaunal extinction, there's a huge number of things that we wouldn't understand about that weight mode of living that, like we people are traveling around huge, vast distances. And that's not just like because nate, like plant life and animal life is so abundant, that's also because one of the other big threats of like like I think there's some studies that suggest that megafauna trampled like 80 of woodyody plants, which means that they were fucking everywhere, right, like they were everywhere. And that makes it impossible to have settlements when you've got massive animals that can trample through in mass migrations of your settlements and things like that. So there's kind of an ecological constraint of relation there. And then we look at spears and we assume there's a massive extractivist relationship when we look at these kind of earlier like weapons and tools for carving meat. Actually plant life would have been much more important to humans. And if megafauna were suppressing plant life, um, and things like that.

Prolekult Films: 1:06:20

So I guess the point I'm trying to draw out of this one is that ecological transformation is both like there is an overkill thesis where humans hunted these things to death, and that part of that is partially true. I don't think it's entirely true. There are medi mediating factors. But then there's a transformation where forests kind of begin to grow because of that extinction and this transformation and humans end up making a new nature out of that process. And that's really kind of interesting because when we can kind of see that and we can understand the complexity it takes to understand that if we attempt to project forward to a communist form of development of society, the people who are going to be managing that new nature and kind of trying to build a new ecological world have to have gone through masses of historical struggle and come to conceive of their relationship with nature and also be able to materially develop their relationship with nature in ways that we won't, can't understand like as lived experience and certainly can't democratically pre-describe.

Prolekult Films: 1:07:16

If we're talking about a project as big as ecological engineering, on the scale it would need to be, like it's not something that you can imagine the context of, because it doesn't exist and so, like the, this is where the technological fetish, I think, gets in the way of trying to find the social forms and intervene these things in politics. Um can actually be done. And I think this ties to a cynicism I have with kind of all ecological politics, which is I don't think you can have a new politics on an ecological basis like, like it's not. You can't rewrite everything possible and kind of change how people interact with and think about and actually engage in politics, simply because we have a better understanding of the ecological problem or of the kind of ecological form of consciousness At a certain point it has to be reintegrated back into like class struggle as it actually exists for people who live in the real world. And that's not a matter of real politic, of a certain investment strain. That's about actual social problems and getting into the meat of them right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:20

Well, that is where I'm actually pretty sympathetic to matt hoover. But, um, you know, for for my critiques of parts of what he argues he is trying to put this back on the table for the real lives of people in in a way that I, I think the, I do think that the, the de-grow first and like, like you, I actually am sympathetic to some of their arguments. I know I don't seem that way on the show, but, uh, because I'm sympathetic with them, actually more frustrated because I'm like but and and what world are you going to get people to do this prefiguratively? Um, I'm not, like, I'm not sure that I think prefigurative politics makes sense, but even if it does, it's just all I see it would be as aligning means to end. Um, and I don't think you can do that just off of ecological will and I also don't think you can do it just based of fear.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:33

In the ecological movement does need to be worked out, because fear is motivating. It is, but it's also motivating in a way that doesn't lead to people actually often addressing what's causing them to be rightly or wrongly afraid, what's causing them to be rightly or wrongly afraid. And you know, I guess in this way, I'm like you. I don't think an ecological politics as such can be removed from the broader jury of politics, which would be class struggle and social reproduction and and, and you know, I think the social reproduction element is something we have to deal with too, and that's the one place where the personal really is political, where of the time that statement's bullshit, but there it's not um that we have to really look at. Like, how are we going to incentivize human kinship relations and whatnot in this new way? Because in the past, when these things changed, so did that. But it's those, you know. When we think about recorded history, uh, we don't have a lot of the past um of human development.

Prolekult Films: 1:10:36

I mean, we have basically, you know, we kind of have 5 000 years, we really have 2 000 years, and when you look at the long duray of human existence, that's nothing yeah, um, and we have to make huge assumptions about, like what it meant and what it means when we're, when we're treating these kind of social questions and like how certain different forms of thing kind of work out, which is, I guess, kind of again comes back to that, that kind of like the problem of the social and the problem of the technical.

Prolekult Films: 1:11:09

Because I think this is like the problems that eco-socialism is getting at, are problems that the communist tendons, like the degrowth versus um eco-modernism debate is getting at, are problems that are implicated in all forms of communist politics. On the one hand, we insist that the communism has to be the real movement of everything that exists, to use marx's phrase, and then, on the other hand, we view communism as a developmental prospect and it realistically has to be both. But they contradict each other in certain circumstances and so that's a really difficult problem to like get into, and I think that is what the degrowth versus eco-modernism debate is still wrestling with. But it's doing it outside of a context of being in like a mass party or something like that. Right, and then are there going to be a social movement and so in that context, it doesn't really mean.

Prolekult Films: 1:12:00

I mean mean much, and outside of academic marxism, as I say, because, like we are talking about things that are fundamentally the way this debate plays out is also mirrored by competition for funding within university systems and things like that, which is going to further develop that antagonism, which is really, really unfortunate, because I think both sides have things that are useful to think about and say, but do so in a way that integrates them into a kind of analysis which is fundamentally anti-strategic, and so those things are kind of important to draw out.

Prolekult Films: 1:12:44

There was another point you made in regard to the kind of way in which you get people to do these things and the kind of fear argument, and I think fear is. I agree with you, fear can be motivating, but I also think it not only can it be unhelpfully motivating, but when we're talking about fear, we're drawing on something that I think is important, particularly in relation to extinction and climate crises, which is also the. We kind of have a retreat back into the immiseration thesis at a certain point, right where it's an ecological version of the immiseration thesis, but it goes that at a certain point, the climate or the extinction crisis will get so bad that humans will be forced into action.

Prolekult Films: 1:13:18

That's the point where this can actually all play out again a lot of communizers believe this, like explicitly yeah the communizers are like the most kind of build the ship and they will come of them all right, like um, but like I guess we saw this play out with the early SPD and the kind of breakdown controversy we talked about when I was last like a while ago when I was on before, and the immiseration thesis is in Marx as well, that there's going to be a polarization of wealth and the problem with it I think we have to look at, after the long kind of time that we've had this kind of come up in Marxist theory, is that people are under those conditions.

Prolekult Films: 1:13:50

Think we have to look at, after the long kind of time that we've had this kind of come up in marxist theory is that people are under those conditions, are often like too overworked and stressed and like unable to organize unless they're in a kind of collective circumstance where they're concentrated in a particular relation to a particular person. To band together like in a factory would be the max classical example. Without those relations which increasingly particularly advanced western societies don't have but also a lot of other places don't have anymore, um, we, we kind of don't really have any axiomatic form of struggle for people to fall into and what happens, then is desperation, and that doesn't lead to a victorious form of organizing or a rally, rallying point like at all.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:35

It tends to lead to stochastic terrorism riots, which I know the communizers tend to like. But I tend to say riots are usually futile, they're recuperable instantly, like um you know, uh, both.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:51

Both in that they invoke reaction because it's tearing shit out without building anything new, and also in that, like, they're so chaotic that other forces can try to speak for them. So um it's I. I do think you know, uh, that we have to, and I think Marxists right now in the West I shouldn't use that, because that's going to get us in a fucking Western Marxist debate, which is also stupid, but my opinions of that are well known. Both Perry Anderson and Dominica Lucerta both created a problem that doesn't even fucking exist, but anyway. My point here, though, is that we are kind of stuck here, and I think the idea that the climate as a miseration thesis is super common, but I think we've already seen it lead to burnout and then to Marxist, eventually moving to maybe even anti-environmental policies like, oh, we just need to go back to smokestack socialism and national development, and I'm just like that won't work. Like this is one thing, the feel nil, who's a commonizer. I don't agree with some of his answers to the problems he poses, but his study and Aaron Binion's study on, basically, organic composition and automation. You can't go back to that. They won't lead to the factories of the past and they won't be organizable like the factories of the past.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:27

And our addiction to that form, because it was kind of easy to organize, has put us in a real bad situation now, because we literally don't have an imaginary construct for what to do or how a party would emerge Other than, like I don't know, vague movements. Riot, riot becomes party somehow. Have a nice day. Yeah, we can make fun of the communizers for that, but I feel like a lot of people actually are like that or like, oh, if we secretly just deal with the contradictions in the parties, for you guys it's the Labor Party, for us it's the Democratic Party, which is even sadder because it's not even a historical Labor Party. It's a coalition of a lot of weird shit, and that doesn't seem to go anywhere either and it just burns people out. And so my fear about the use of fear as an organizational tactic is that it leads people to being very stupid and not realizing that they're also they're playing with a psychological force that almost inherently invokes reaction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:30

And I do think you know Mark's. I've read a lot of Marx's letters and Marx seems to be going back and forth on how to deal with that after the 1850s, that's when he seems to abandon the immiseration thesis. I think so it just seems. It just seems like we're in a world where, okay, so the economic crisis doesn't prompt it. What other crisis can we have that magically solves the problem for us? And I'm just like. I don't think ecology by itself will magically solve the problem of forcing everyone to become good socialists. It might just force us to all kill each other. I don't know, it's a possibility.

Prolekult Films: 1:18:07

Yeah, it could definitely do that, definitely do that, and it could also force us into a kind of incessant visionary apocalypticism which leads to incessant disappointment, in the same way that the kind of breakdown theory did. Um, like, I'm still like a defender of like marxist theory of breakdown, which is another kind of question I have in relation to eco-socialism, because I find it intriguing that a lot of the kind of thinking does rely on a kind of catastrophic ecological breakdown, like immiseration thesis, but simultaneously tries to discard any kind of composition crisis out the window as having any kind of final blow to capitalism ever potentially possible. And that's something that's been with us since Paul Paquette at least, which is a really interesting contradiction to be in, because you have just outright swapped it in such a way which means that you can't get accused of the movements past the snakes whilst also preserving them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:06

I saw that explicitly in Saito, too, where Saito's like well, maybe Lukasz just needed a crisis, but it was the ecological crisis. I read an essay where he argued that and I was like so you want crisis, but it was the ecological crisis. I read an essay where he argued that and I was like so you want crisis theory, but just about the soil as opposed to the money.

Prolekult Films: 1:19:21

Yeah, I also thought it was a fundamentally kind of shift that I think occurs with the eco-socialist stuff, not in all the thinkers, but have you read kind of Baldizzoni's book on like various different views of the collapse of capitalism? No, I have not, okay. So it's really interesting and he breaks it down into sort of four categories. So Marx, he said kind of through the falling rate of profit theory and all this kind of stuff, had an implosion thesis of capitalism's demise, whereas the ecological argument that it's going to run out of resources, which is fundamentally what the eco-socialist catastrophe would be, is actually quite distinct from that and is an extrinsic crisis that comes from like exhaustion of natural resources rather than the internal dynamics of the system.

Prolekult Films: 1:20:14

And therefore that is, and that has more in common with like keynes or like um john, uh, who is it? It's another john, forgotten, the other theorist, but yeah, more in common with keynes than it does with marx, for example. And and Saito's, one of Saito's kind of positions that like I kind of think about when I think about this, is when he talks about decommodification and he's actually just talking about Keynesian merit goods, like that's what that logic is. He's saying certain commodities need to be taken out of the market and through that we'll decommodify the entire kind of logic of the market by producing it in this way. That's Keynes' theory of merit cuts.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:56

Right, yeah, so there's a part of both the Mega 2 crowd led by Heinrich in Germany and the Monthly Review crowd that really holds on to 1950s theories of monopoly capital and kind of does what I?

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:18

I don't know that it's so important, but I do actually think it's somewhat dishonest, frankly, of arguing that the economic problems of capitalism basically were solved by management and Keynesian and Keynesian merit goods and Keynesian management of the economy, as if the seventies didn't happen. It's very, very strange to me that that's being maintained and that is really popular and de-growth world and I don't know, I actually don't even really understand why, like I'm like what you know, I actually don't even really understand why, like I'm like what you know, other than historically, the two movements that come out of, but like Heinrich, stuff on Marx and money kind of tries to make Marx more copacetic to Keynesian policies and maybe that's controversial to say, but it seems pretty crucial to me. So what do you make about that? I think there's way too much focus on marxology in a lot of this, but sometimes I do think because of the focus in marxology it leads us to say things that aren't true I think that's very, very much the case.

Prolekult Films: 1:22:23

Um, I think the focus on marxology is a really interesting one because it the pretense, because it's kind of developed through the conflict between like first and second wave modern western eco-socialism, if we want to kind of put it down to something like that, like the dispute between like bellamy foster, buquette, on the one hand, and um, people like james o'connor and kind of a few earlier other earlier eco-socialist theorists over like the value analysis and how that fitted with like non-human nature. Nature produces wealth in Marx, it doesn't produce value and all this kind of stuff. And there's uses to that in terms of kind of like trying to integrate it with the green movement that existed at the time, but in terms of like now it's become its own kind of self-spiraling thing. So like that's that's one of the controversies in which it emerges. We have the re-emergence of these kind of controversies around the metabolic rift theory with like a clash, the clash between bellamy foster and jason w moore. We have this with like the, the kind of cyto thinking.

Prolekult Films: 1:23:29

We kind of have this with various different things and I think it's because there's an attempt to say to kind of like give a new reading of marx in lieu of the promethean argument, which then lends itself to an overreaction, to needing to re-quantify all of his ideas in order to make him still a viable theorist to draw from, because people so closely associate marx is remarks on capitalism as progressive force, that it in kind of his earlier works particularly, but like you know, in terms of certain kind of raw material outputs and things like that, and also, crucially for marx, I think, like the productive kind of scientific development it opens up and there's an overreaction to that that comes in through the marxology, I think, and I think there's a really kind of there's a want to preserve it and to tie things back to a history and particularly to certain types of tendencies that have existed, particularly anti-imperialist ones, which I think is in some ways a healthy impulse, but then has its own kind of problems that come in um and then so, yeah, that that's that's kind of one way I would perceive it is. I think it's an overreaction. I think the debate on the fetter thesis that emerged between uh, huber and heron, which was the one I kind of had the podcast on, is really useful to illustrate that, because heron has an article where he argues that, like um this, the fetter thesis, which is the argument the relations of production at certain points stop the development of the means of production under a given mode of production. In the preface to a contribution to a critique of political economy by Marx, heron kind of views that as the position of the ecomodernist thesis, and I think it is.

Prolekult Films: 1:25:11

But I also think it's the position of the degrowth thesis, because the argument there would be that restorative agriculture is fettered by capitalism. Right, because in the same way that, like machine technologies is fettered by rate of profit problems, capitalism, spatial dynamics would presumably fetter those kind of ecological, sustainable agriculture if you need a redistribution of populations. And so in an overreaction it ends up replicating the kind of problems. Both sides of the debate do this on that front. But a lot of other kind of Marxological debates end up replicating the problems that they're reacting to just in a kind of inverted way. And I think that's ultimately from viewing Marx as a kind of authoritative theorist rather than something that's meant to be applied to the real world and in a form of organizing and in a political movement, not as an academic interest, which is kind of how Marx is now reinterpreted.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:09

Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to sound all Stephen Jay Gouldy up in here, but I do sort of think like, as long as we treat Marxism as a static theory which I can go back and just like, read capital and recite it and it has all the answers for me, that leads to similar overreactions where you know people and I know plenty of people who do this will be like well, marx was wrong about barter. If so facto Marx is wrong about everything, because he was wrong about something that nobody else was right about either. You know, I mean, I even point out that, like dude, the founders of thealist school thought that barter was the origins of capital. Until Innes Mitchell, it's not even. It's not even the own you think it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:10

But there are things there are. There are contradictions, and I don't mean this in the like oh, marx is contradicting himself, although that does happen a few times. But there are contradictions in like, these tendencies in socialism, and maybe we need to be good hegelians about this, as want as I am to say that, because that tends to put us in the realm of pure academia. But we're like oh no, there are. There are fundamental contradictory tensions in socialism too, and that development of productive forces is one of them. The national or international question is another, which this also runs straight into. Do you fix this by a national project or an international project? National project doesn't really seem to be that likely to work, but it also seems to be the way you could do it under current conditions, right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and I think we need to be more realistic about these are things we have to work out by doing them and by building that movement, and that will probably mean socialism won't look exactly like it has in the past when we actually start to to move in that direction. I mean, I'm loathe to give certain people platypus, affiliated society a whole lot of credit, but they're right about that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:32

That like socialism is not going to look like what we think socialism would look like now. I mean, if we're our models are you know, 1917 or whatever, it might have elements of that. I would almost assuredly will, but what's actually going to look like is going to be probably very different on a bunch of different social questions. I don't just think the ecological one is going to be the only one. That makes things quite difficult. I mean, I do think, for example, going back to Marx and Lenin on the national question creates all kinds of new problems for us in light of what happened in the Soviet Union and you know, soviet satellite States and great Russian show capitalism and the kind of fine line Lennon tried to walk about, social patriotism versus Jingo socialism and all that it it those. Those to me aren't really answered either. But yeah, I guess this is a way in which the Marxology actually does not really totally help us at all.

Prolekult Films: 1:29:41

But I think it's perhaps a way of explaining why the climate and eco-socialism debate is so symptomatic of these problems and why Marxology appears right. It's because when we're dealing with a subject as big as climate and extinction crises, when we're dealing with all these things, they touch on every aspect of social, economic and political life. Every single one and every kind of discipline needs to have its response to it. And to do that, as we said at the start, like different disciplines come up with different challenges and they have to try and apply their previous ideas to show their own validity.

Prolekult Films: 1:30:12

And I think when we get to this question there and we get into how Marxological a lot of the eco-socialist debates really are and controversies really are, or versus how utilitarian and functional they are, when we're dealing with the technical fetish expression of it, what we tend to see is that all of the problems, of all of the unresolved questions of our movement crop up through that process, because we're trying to condense them all into one thing and then filter it through marks in order to try and make sense of it, and it's just not possible to manage that. It's a very, very I mean. I want to say it's like a scaffolding build out of dodgy materials, almost right like you can't. You can't quite like keep it's like a scaffolding build out of dodgy materials almost you can't quite. Keep it up like that. It's not going to manage the challenges ahead and it's not going to be able to integrate them properly, because you're condensing everything into one field whilst also pretending you're not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:06

To expand the metaphor, it's like trying to build a skyscraper with scaffolds made out of duct tape. It just doesn't really work. Um, uh, so it's it. I think this, uh, this is my last question and this is what I didn't prompt you for, but it's probably one that you can kind of speak towards a little bit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:25

Um, this leads us to a very to very interesting predicament, uh, about dealing with the contradictions of our movement in regards to the eco crisis, but in general I bring up the national one, because that one seems to be really hot right now um, how do we? Um both be honest about the fact we we need a programmatic approach to politics, however, that if we try to put too much in the program, it will, a be undemocratic for the past against the future, and, b we can't know how these, how these social categories and stuff are going to change as we start to change the material world, and that that seems to me to interestingly put us in the same kind of. In a way, our liberal and conservative adversaries have an easier time of it because they don't have a doctrine they hold on to. So where, marxists, do I mean to understand the Bolshevik Revolution? You do actually kind like, like, to understand the bolshevik revolution, you do actually kind of have to understand marxist theory, um, and I mean, how do we, how do we handle that, that central tension?

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:43

Because it is something, um, and you, you know, you watch me on twitter I'm always like I'm I'm probably the key raver about how almost everybody's secretly an opportunist or a talist, um, but I'm also like I don't really know what, what marks like. If I had a marxist movement, truly speaking right now, I actually don't know what it would look like, and I mean that sincerely, and I think that people are confused by that, you know, and that that kind of that's. I do think it scares Marxists to be like, no, we really are lipping off of something that we don't know how to build, like fundamentally Like yeah, it's a.

Prolekult Films: 1:33:26

It's a terrifying question because, like I mean I was I mentioned before I came on the show that I was speaking in Germany before this and one of the questions we kind of covered quite intensely in those discussions was the sect form, which kind of deals with these same problems of, like you know, the old Haldraper sect form kind of arguments and Marx's letters on kind of a sect being distinct from the international and all these kind of things and the idea of, like socialists without a movement being one way of looking at the problem. That's one way of looking at the problem. But then there's also the kind of difficulty of kind of looking at various different kind of ways in which working classes are structured and all these different problems that give us with a picture of a very different world. And it's perhaps perhaps no wonder, I think, that anarchism and kind of NGO movement building are much more dominant forces than us in certainly ecological activism, but also within kind of general activism, I would say now, if not NGO approaches, then certainly more corporatised than a union structure would have been. And I think that that's just a kind of reality that we're wrestling with and I don't think that there are easy answers.

Prolekult Films: 1:34:43

And when you get to the end of explaining these problems, it's really dissatisfying to have to say that we kind of building not from scratch, because everyone would always like to build from scratch and that's part of the problem is that we don't have the capacity to have these kind of intricate tactical discussions based on like really concrete understandings of class forces, because we're so busy snapping at each other over our discourse, over our dogmatisms and our little kind of ideological fetishes that we can never move on from that. And in order to kind of have those real discussions, I think the only thing you can kind of look at is like real class compositions where weak points might appear and then try to get creative with your organizing in that respect, because otherwise you're just doing we're just running into the same problems or waiting for the divine breakdown or the divine immiseration thesis or the divine ecological immiseration thesis to select whichever of the god-given few Marxists exist on the world to lead the revolution and guide it to victory. Right, and that just hasn't worked and it's been around an unconscionable amount of time as a construct. And being honest about that and saying right, we need to sincerely get back to the social critique, sincerely map out what the spatial logics of capitalism are now, what the spatial kind of like requirements of capitalism are now, what the actual impact this has in structuring people's lives are, which is a thing we do academically all the time, but then we don't apply it to, say, workers inquiries in the same way that we do outside of a very small number of organizations that undertake that kind of stuff.

Prolekult Films: 1:36:17

We don't have access to the same kind of understanding of conditions. We don't have access to the same concentrations of population in individual workplaces I don't think I mean the average in Britain the workplace someone works with 25 other people tops in their department. It's hardly the industrial strength that Marx was talking about. That's a class composition problem and it's a real one. And how we breached that is actually really incredibly difficult without trying to think of new creative answers and trying to shed ourselves of that dogmatism and really put a nail in it. That's not satisfying and it's never a satisfying answer.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:53

Right, I mean, I think one answer that's happening in America is we need to reshore all the factories so that we can organize them Without going back to socialism.

Prolekult Films: 1:37:08

We need the capitalist development so we can have a revolution again.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:12

I'm just like, oh man, this is like a parody of plakanov logic, yeah, but it really exists. And and I get it because it like even something small, like thinking about how you organize the service sectors in there. And and I saw a fight on, uh, on twitter between two people I respect actually, who like gathered each other's throat and totally tossed past each other about, like, the problems of the service sector, and none of these were people who do this stupid shit. Like baristas aren't proletariat because reasons, but you know, petite bourgeois people are, or whatever. But we see that a lot and I think we are faced today with actually interestingly, I'm hesitant to say trauma because, fuck, that's been ruined by everybody.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:06

Um, we can't use that, but like some kind of primal shock about the fact that we just had a, you know, and and most of the West, and and I mean this not just as an Anglo North America, in Europe, I also mean in Latin America the left has had its best and worst showing simultaneously in a long time.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:37

Like we actually seem to be kind of close to the, the uh, you know, to the possibility of levers of power, and every single case we fucked it up. Um, so like uh, I mean bernie and and corbin are not even the the worst ones. I mean, cerise is a way way bigger deal. Pademos is a way bigger deal. The failure of the french socialist party is a way bigger. Bill melancholy's uh, new popular front being stalled out by I don't know, uh macron deciding that maybe vichy was better, is, uh, is is a bigger deal. You know, and um, I mean, you know, those of us in the anglophone world, we don't even get to lose that big um so if only we could lose that big right, it would say a lot if we get.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:32

but I mean you see this a lot in america. Like americans will be like, oh look, the british labor is really standing up to, to the tories and the capitalists. And I'm like, yeah, they're losing. Like our labor isn't standing up because they don't want to lose, so, so and they know it. I mean I'm in a union, they know it. I mean I'm in a union, they know it. Like so it's something else.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:56

And I also think the removal of a lot of Marxists I mean what's interesting? This will be my last question. This was not something I planned to ask you. This is my true last question what do we make about the fact that the academic Marxist debates are no longer limited to the academy, as the academy itself, particularly humanities, where the Marxists hit out at, is dying in the Anglophone world, particularly in America? Like I mean Big quest, so it's spread out all over the place. You and I are proof of that in a way, like we would If history had been different. You know, I'd just been normal, stupid, academic marxist. Um, so, uh, you know, I mean yeah, uh, oh, if I only could have a career like, like the late jameson, but nonetheless. Uh, that isn't preserved for us, but I think our movement has those impulses even in the non-academic parts of it. So how do we change that? That's my final question.

Prolekult Films: 1:41:07

So I think there's a lot of things that we can do in that direction and it requires a lot.

Prolekult Films: 1:41:15

It requires we have like a movement which simultaneously understands the grandeur of the tasks that we face but also can proceed with them without, without any kind of like illusions that what we're doing right now is like the most humble, most kind of like pre-formative parts of trying to do movement building right, like that is kind of where we're back at again and we have to be honest about that.

Prolekult Films: 1:41:38

But then in order to get out of it, we need to start building like, I think, educational networks that aren't simply in for points of informational distribution but have some degree of like actual structure in teaching and actual like engaged not only in kind of marxist academic stuff but in like actual like skills that working class people need is like a really important thing that we need to engage in right, and I think that's something that the preserve of academic marxism kind of present prevents, because whilst those people do engage in both of those activities the part where they're giving skills out or research skills or all that that's the paid part of their job that goes to university students, and lord knows, we've tried to rely on that as a basis for marxism for far too fucking long, and so that that's kind of one way out.

Prolekult Films: 1:42:25

We need to be building these kind of educational resources. Um, I think that requires some degree of actually like building spatial resources because, like you and I exist in the online sphere. There's limits to what we can do in terms of presenting educational material, in terms of trying to build that kind of culture. I think both of us probably do a lot more than we would like, want, like necessarily talk about as shows. Like I do a lot of meetings and host a lot of discussion groups and things like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:51

Yeah, I'm in a union, so yeah, it's been a a lot of discussion groups and things like that. Yeah, I'm in a union, so yeah, it's been a whole lot of time doing union shit actually. But but yeah, and I'm a public school teacher and but even then I'm always like there are things that I need someone else to teach you, like how to fix your car that has this many goddamn electronics in it. Like yeah, like you know, and stuff like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:11

Because I have been thinking about the way capital has gone and I'm not a believer in the neo feudal thesis, but I have been like the level of complexity does make teaching people how to do basic stuff a lot harder. Yeah, like I can't teach you how to fix your car, and for good reasons, but I can't do it. Like it requires a ton and increasingly even like with computer stuff, like the coders don't even know how to fucking code anymore. So like it's, it's, uh, it, you know they're, they're relying on on, uh, they're relying on the dead labor of prior coders as manifested in ai, uh, um, outputs, as much as you inventing new elegant code and like master coders will complain about this, but I'm like, and so in general, we're seeing the capitalist kind of be unable to reproduce socially necessary stuff and we got to go like, and we need to do it like by ourselves, yeah, with no resources, I think that's.

Prolekult Films: 1:44:13

But I do think that building those kind of smaller educational stuff, trying to get federated networks of kind of like people who discuss similar syllabuses and like offer practical stuff as well, like, uh, one of the things that I always offer to people if they like engage with political works, I'll give benefit, support and stuff like that in britain and that kind of like thing, just if you're engaging with me politically, I'm going to talk about it.

Prolekult Films: 1:44:36

But making like because the way in which the kind of movements that did happen were born wasn't out of just thought, it was out of social context.

Prolekult Films: 1:44:48

Even if we look at kind of the early Marxist sects in England that Marx kind of has a huge number of disagreements with but end up becoming really important to the formation of the union movement Later, the Communist Party of Great Britain and so on and so forth play a social role in the community where there's an aggregation of resources for working class people and things like that in those centres, whilst also retaining a very strict kind of educational purpose from the backroom discussions, and that's done informally but it kind of integrates the two and I think those kind of things are like we do a lot of educational work on the left, but a lot of the time we're trying to do it in an ideological reproduction sense rather than a social movement building sense, and I think that there's a difference between those two things and I really think that it's difficult to do because obviously the nature of what a community or a workplace or something is has really drastically changed.

Prolekult Films: 1:45:43

But the only way we can really get into it is by trying to build those institutions, because it's only when we have viable institutions that can reproduce themselves without reinforcing some dead-end dogma or some kind of political program as the primary function, that we can begin to actually exist as a social force which can then take it up to that political level.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:03

Right, yeah, I don't think we can build a political program until we have done the pre political work, and that includes education, but it also includes, like, having real representatives in various communities and being dispersed, and for us in America, it means also you, you, you can't only be in fucking New York and LA. Yeah, right, like which? Uh, even the DSA, which has more of this apparatus that we would want than almost anything else, does, um, that's where they are, that's where they are Like, that's where they are, that's where they are like, that's their, their concentration is very much, and, uh, and you know, new york and la, and um, that's great, cool, uh, but it's not going to be nearly enough.

Prolekult Films: 1:46:47

Um, and yeah, it's hard to ask particularly not in Particularly, not in context of what we've been discussing today in an ecological context right. One of the things I highlighted is people need viable land policy. Eventually that should be a political objective of a movement I'm sure it is in certain NGO contexts and certain other kind of contexts. But in terms of getting there we need to do the hard work of like, first of all, analysing what the rural really looks like, because it's a lot poorer than a lot of Marxists assume.

Prolekult Films: 1:47:24

Certainly, kind of urban-based Marxists and things like that, particularly in England I don't know how true it is of the US have a very, very view that the English countryside and the Scottish countryside and the scottish countryside and the welsh countryside are filled with like quite wealthy people, whereas in reality you still have like incredibly poor, like service worker orientated, like working classes, certain very, very small kind of sections of productive activity out there and then seasonal labor on farms or tenant farmers and things do still exist right. And those are all very, very important elements of an analysis. To kind of root yourself there and getting rooted in rural life, providing institutions that those people can actually kind of work through and meet In any kind of eco-socialist approach. Surely that should be the starting point is getting an understanding of the class relations that we actually have to enter into and struggle with it Right, and I think that that's actually a hugely neglected area for a country like Britain or a country like the United States.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:25

Absolutely, James. What do you got coming out on Pro Cult Land and where can they find your work?

Prolekult Films: 1:48:31

So you can find us on YouTube Pro Cult, on YouTube Pro Cult Fil and where can they find your work? So you can find us on YouTube Pro Cult, on YouTube Pro Cult Films, on Twitter Pro Cult Films on Instagram and Pro Cult on TikTok. Now, tiktok is just clips from the videos, so if you actually want to watch the longer form content, I'd recommend you just do it as the longer form content. We are presently in a bit of a conundrum because we have a funding question on this. We just finished our 45-hour documentary, foreland, part One Capital as Extinction, which goes over the spatial logics of capitalism as an extinction force, separating that out from different approaches that are taken by bourgeois science although I hate to use that term mainstream science, science.

Prolekult Films: 1:49:19

although I hate to use that term, um, mainstream science although I hate to use that term as well. You know kind of the kind of arguments we've talked around today. Um, we want to do that as a trilogy, with part two looking at um a critique of conservation under capitalism and a critique of renewable energy infrastructure um, under capitalism but then and of renewable energy infrastructure under capitalism. And then part three would be a kind of critique of eco-socialism, as we've kind of discussed for a lot of today, with an element on kind of movement building and strategizing. Those are kind of both incredibly ambitious projects and we're looking for quite a big production, quite a big funding increase in order to be able to make those. Because of the time and time requirements that our longer videos really kind of put on us, like there's a hell of a lot of research I have to do and then editing them, because we actually use like quite a lot of footage of of gold mines, for example, in this, which was really hard to find. That takes a lot of research and preparation as well as kind of processing as well. So, feature films we're kind of running a fundraising campaign around that at the minute and then once we reach the threshold of. I think it's 2,200 or 2,400 a month on Patreon. We can commit to them then.

Prolekult Films: 1:50:26

Until then we're doing continuing our kind of Approaching Marxism series. The next episode will be on communism and looking at again another question that we've kind of discussed today, that contradiction between movement building and development program. That exists within the heart of the communist question in Marx and since and we also run regular educationals we have an eco-communism study and development group which various different people who kind of attend through our Discord and will present various different pieces of information. That way we run classes on the Approaching Marxism series and we have a capital study group that runs, I think, twice a month through our Discord as well. So that's all kind of the work that we've got going on at the minute. The shorter videos are definitely going to continue, but that fundraising campaign really is there for the longer form ones, so we can continue to do those as well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:16

Yeah, I would tell people to support your work. I do, and I've endorsed this film. You guys should check it out. I thought it was really great.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:25

I also just going to point out, even though you're making clip documentaries with voiceovers, that's just fucking hard. I don't think people realize how much time that shit takes. Um, yeah, people like like, I barely edit anything and it still takes me. When I do edit, it takes me hours to do so, like, um, you know, and so those clip videos, those actually require a lot of fucking labor. People, um, and people gotta eat.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:55

So, uh, our, our, afford research books or whatever. Um, get into archives, you gotta do somehow. It's hard to do this shit without academic institutions. I will totally admit that, as a person writing a book, it's like, oh god, I gotta do this over spare time. Um, um, but that's where we are, and I don't know, I'm very mixed on the decline of the academy, but in some ways I think for Marxists it might actually end up being an okay thing if we can break our bad habits. But on that note, we're done. Thank you so much, james, for coming on. People should definitely go check out your work. I learned a lot from it and I really appreciate the work you do. Thank you.