MaxA [he/him]

1. I think the most important is to read a lot, whether in formal academic structures or probably more beneficially, otherwise, and read material from the third world, especially stuff from the 60s-80s, before the intellectual apparatus was placed under neo-liberal siege. from there any of us can figure out how to make our contribution from the knowledge we have.

2. there is a huge shaming in the US but really in most of the world about any kind of manual labor, I think educational systems need to work against that, while also enfolding ecological thinking in the "trades" (which after all require a huge amount of knowledge in the first place, and could involve even more knowledge the more ecological concerns are braided into the skilling process)

3. my pleasure!

I think I got to some of this below, but I also think thinking about flood resilience, tree planting, is all incredibly important. In the most abstract sense, how can we build up more local use-values that make our lives better in the present, plan for what's to come, and yet don't rely on extraction from the south? That's what I tried to think through, maybe with mixed results, in my book. So, the more green spaces, water barrels, permeable pavement, lawns with mixes of perennial native crops, etc, the better, and these could be popular campaigns in almost any locality in the US. And why not build campaigning around them with campaigning for climate debt payments and demilitarization, emphasing the latter as the production of waste and the socially destructive use of our common resources?

I think in our moment there are a lot of people from distinct social layers and experiences getting involved in politics, and entering with a lot of liberal baggage. For all their mistakes, it's good to see XR in motion, and I think there's an opening to engage more with what they are doing.

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.

I would check out this beautiful book from Venezuela Analysis, Monthly Review, I feel like both VA and this book aren't circulating amongst activists as I would have expected, but there's no better place to learn about the ongoing Bolivarian process, and the book is great (I have a review coming out sometime in the next year....) https://monthlyreview.org/product/venezuela_the_present_as_struggle/

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

I have no idea. I'm sympathetic to the party form and am not sure there is an alternative which has surpassed it in terms of changing the world. The Venezuela commune model is also important to learn from.

I would expect in the coming years (although it is already happening) there will be intensive organizational disruption of any functioning or healthy formations. There are also billions of foundation money flowing in to try to decapitate all popular movements and rope them into the Dem Party.

The farming technologies were basically a system of "betting on the strong": they relied on a set of farmers who had enough capital to access the capital-intensive technologies. So the GR was never about ending hunger. Riocha Kumar shows that there was not a foodgrain availability crisis in post-Independence India: https://www.epw.in/journal/2019/34/technology-and-society/indias-green-revolution-and-beyond.html so the important thing is to think about how the technologies were the deliberately-chosen weapons in a class war from above. I think we need to try to resist the temptation to make forces or relations of production the prime mover here -- both were important. Other options also existed at that time, above all a widespread agrarian reform, but this was blocked by regional landlords and governments. We have to remember also that famine in the modern period is also never about insufficient food, but about insufficient social power to access the food which is there, or is being exported.

I think an eco-socialist transition would have to make basically all technology open-source and popularly controlled, which would almost certainly mean we would no longer accept technologies which become rapidly obsolete.

For other work, check out the studies of Stan Cox, Keston Perry, Mimi Sheller, The Agroecology Research Corps, La Via Campesina and their working documents, Bikrum Gill.

I think that kind of worry and grief is completely paralyzing! We need to get rid of the corporations and try to fix the damage they've left behind for the coming generations.

Yes!

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.

Definitely the most likely is option number one, elite transition. but it is most likely only if the current forces in the core remain disorganized and politically and organizationally unmoored from southern movements. So, I couldn't say at all how likely that is -- it's totally unpredictable. In some ways there is a rising extremely politically conscious anti-systemic sentiment within the imperial core which cannot be wished away by capitalists, but which also has yet to take real organizational form.

The Bowman legislation is good legislation, I didn't have time to look at the technical details regarding what constitutes a retrofit and if that will be contracted out to private companies or if the state will take it on. If the former, then it is sadly just creating a new frontier for "green" accumulation.