About the Book

Max Ajl – ‘A People’s Green New Deal’. The idea of a Green New Deal has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal? In this concise book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, their ideological underpinnings, and their limitations. Ajl goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a ‘People’s Green New Deal’ committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.

Resources

In this episode we interview Max Ajl, author of the new book A People’s Green New Deal.

Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to a number of journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society

In this discussion we talk to Ajl about his critiques of various forms of climate policy emanating from the capitalist and imperialist ruling class, and he situates the AOC/Markey Green New Deal as sharing a great deal ideologically and in terms of program with other capitalist so-called solutions to the climate crisis.

What Ajl advocates instead is an anti-colonial perspective, and a total infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and strong solidarity movements and convergences with climate proposals coming from the Global South, such as those laid out in the Cochabamba People’s Accords.

We strongly recommend this book as key to framing what a liberatory horizon can be for climate struggle on the left.

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Max Ajl, sociologist and author, joins Breht to discuss his book "A People's Green New Deal".

Topics Discussed: the liberal Green New Deal, the history of colonialism, eco-modernism, climate reparations, the Cochabamba's Peoples Agreement, degrowth, ecosocialism, agroecology, the national question, Green Capitalism, and much more.

Max's work: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Max-Ajl

Max's Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxajl

Schedule:

Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (57 pages) - Sept 11th | Chapter 3, Chapter 4 (42 pages) - Sept 18th | Chapter 5, Chapter 6 (47 pages) - Sept 25th | Chapter 7, Conclusion (24 pages) - October 2nd