Please drop your questions here, in preparation for the author's arrival.
Max Ajl
Max Ajl is a doctoral student in Development Sociology at Cornell University. He currently is based in Tunis, where he is doing his dissertation research on state agricultural development policy and the politics of price fixing during the era of state-directed development and the transition to capitalist agriculture in the countryside. His fields of expertise include comparative international development, political economy of social change, world-systems theory, Middle East political economy, and rural political economy. His academic writing has been published in many venues, including Historical Materialism, MERIP, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has presented at universities in Tunisia and across North America, including at Cornell, Columbia, and the University of California – Berkeley. He co-edits the Palestine page at Jadaliyya.
Topics of Interest:Rural Sociology, World-Systems Theory, Political Economy, Historical Sociology, Agrarian Change, the Politics of the Global Food System, Ecological Economics, Development Theory, Colonialism, US Foreign PolicyCountries/Regions of Interest:Tunisia, Israel/Palestine, the United States
Book Summary
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.
Apperances
Millenials are killing capitalism
Video -GREEN NEW DEAL: Max Ajl and Kali Akuno
Video - Only Anti-Imperialism Can Save Us From Climate Catastrophe, With Max Ajl
Other Writings
Monthly Review
AMA Session is over, thank you everyone who participated and left preparatory questions. Thank you, once again to, Max Ajl for coming on and answering our questions.
I hope this was an insightful and educational session. Ya'll have a great weekend <3 to all comrades!
Thanks for doing this max! A couple of questions based on what I've read in APGND (I'm only up to chapter 6 though, unfortunately!):
One passage that stood out to me was about the agroecology of North America, before European invasion. Throughout the book you make it clear that we'll have to construct similar sustainable food supply chains in the future. Do you have any thoughts on the impact climate change might have on the more traditional/indigenous agricultural techniques? Will the changing climate actually make some of those strategies untenable in the future? For instance, I live in Australia, and worry that even a couple of degrees of warming could wreak havoc on food structures here, even using traditional methods - those methods were created over thousands of years and adapted to a pre-warmed Earth, after all.
Do you see a role in the future for seasonal work, with city-dwellers spending a portion of the year doing agricultural labour, during sowing/harvesting season for example, or do you think it is more of a priority to re-ruralise the population on a more permanent basis?
And a pretty massive question for my final one: what do you think is the most important work non-colonised people in the imperial core can do TODAY to work towards a just people's green new deal? Fight for land rights? Create grassroots urban/community farming structures? Fight for political power?
One thing about agroecology is that it is an abstraction from a set of farming techniques, rather than the techniques themselves. Agroecology is about decentralization of knowledge about how to farm and using closed cycles to farm, and focusing on things like resilience, stability, rather than focusing on quantitative production. It also follows the principle of not just decentralized knowledge, but also in a sense, worker control over the production process. Although the accumulated knowledge of how to manage the landscape relies for its utility on a more or less stable landscape, and cannot easily be resurrected if the landscape changes, it's still important to keep in mind that new "forms" of knowledge and farming and landscape management can be created for when/if the climate shifts.
Q2 is tough. I just have no idea. My rough thinking is that in the north, we should start with people who want to get involved in farming whether in the countryside or the city, and create all the necessary social and cultural infrastructure, including land reform, training, but also hospitals and railways, to make that life as attractive and welcoming as possible. Only after should we raise questions of how to actually allocate labor. For now, it's an extremely speculative question.
For non-colonized people in the core: fight for non-commodified "greening" and resilience of the public infrastructure: public transportation should be basically free, and upgraded and use renewable energy, utilities should be publicly owned, green spaces should be public, built everywhere for flood abatement. Once public ownership is in place locally or municipally, we will be in a better position to shift the forms of technology that are in use. All organizing should look locally and internationally at the same time, in other words while we focus on "economic-ecological" demands for decommodified green reconstruction locally, we need to be demanding/support national sovereignty in the periphery, Indigenous liberation, demilitarization, and climate debt, which means raising consciousness about those demands and struggles within local organizing.
Are there any initiatives or movements you can recommend to get involved with / use as rolemodels regarding this?
I think Cooperation Jackson did a lot of work people should learn from; some of the Red Nations work here has been very important. I also am sympathetic to a lot of the line struggle going on in DSA over these issues. But I don't really live in the US so I may not be as attuned as others to the good work going on in a lot of places. My sense is that there is a real struggle to look locally and internationally simultaneously.
Thanks! If you know of some good orgs in the eu, feel free to give them a callout as well