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!
- MaxA [he/him]·3 years ago
- Not sure I perfectly understand the question, but I think unfortunately there will be climate refugees from South to North in the years to come. Eventually thinking about that will be important, but too much of the refugee discussion including on the left in the core focuses on accepting refugees rather than clear opposition to the polarized accumulation via war and ecological catastrophe which creates refugees in the first.
- I think the presentation of this in my book may have been sloppy, but I don't think we can snap labor time accounting out of existence in the short term just about anywhere, exactly as you say, because the value form is precisely how some people command the labor and resources of others. It's a long-run goal oriented to defending the use-value of agricultural and industrial labor, especially in the third world, including the work of subsistence production and the defense and maintenance of socially useful nature.
- I thought the bullshit jobs thesis was about the fact that people just aren't doing anything in their office work, which raises the question of why they're doing it -- part of that seems like Graeber's anti-marxism, and the other part Eurocentrism -- those jobs on the one hand are maybe, or have, provided some kind of labor needed in the value chain, but on the other have been a way of weaving service workers into the neoliberal social pact.
- I don't know! It's tricky. The way I tried to address this in my book is through focusing on qualitative consumption rather than quantitative, that people do like nice things, that's OK, the issue is actually democratizing access to them and replacing cheap and bad things which nice things which last a long time, and which people may have to be more involved in actually making and maintaining.