![[Book Club Discussion | Part 1] A People's Green New Deal by Max Ajl](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/nbaI4BEr3Y.png){kind=link}
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
Lol thanks for these questions. I had no idea what to type otherwise than just "holy shit what a book!"
I 100% thought it was gonna be a socdem-like book about the green new deal which is why I wasn't really that interested in reading it. I was completely fucking wrong, obviously. Like, almost every sentence in the book is gripping and makes me giddy.
The idea of today's technology being welded onto the hands of bourgeoisie, making it impossible to simply "take over the state machinery and use it for good" is completely mind-blowing me to. I'd never even thought of that and it just fills me with dread.
His stuff about veganism rubbed me the wrong way. Like, I get his point about capital/technological intensive industries like Beyond Meat and stuff are beyond useless for combating climate change, but that doesn't mean we can't eat rice and beans goddammit!
Also, the idea is to prevent the association of "meat" with "wealth" in ex-colonial nations which is what usually happens when their GDP increases and we see a corresponding increase in their meat consumption. Like, we all want Bangladeshis to be healthier. But we don't want Bangladeshis to be into factory farming.
His critiques of Bastani and FALC are incredible.
I feel like his veganism critiques are primarily coming from an indigenous, sustainable raising of animals. In the RevLeft episode he gives the example of how the buffalo was actually very important for the grassland ecosystem of the Midwest and their near-extinction helped cause the dust storms of the 1930s. He also draws a line between some vegan advocates, animal rights, and malthusian or misanthropic beliefs, which in my opinion is more like "don't throw the baby with the bathwater" type problem.