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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">As Chávez said, ‘Let's not
change the climate, let's change the system!’: A
Conversation with Max Ajl</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Cira
Pascual Marquina – October29, 2021</div>
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<p><em>This week and through November 12, the United
Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes
place in Glasgow, Scotland. COP26 brings together
heads of state and other prominent figures to talk
about climate change. However, the conference won’t
address the central environmental problem:
capitalism. In this interview we talk to </em><a
href="https://twitter.com/maxajl"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>Max Ajl</em></a><em>,
author of </em><a
href="https://t.co/6sbnpjN7DO?amp=1"
moz-do-not-send="true">A People’s Green New Deal</a>
<em>(Pluto Press, 2021), which examines the capitalist
roots of the environmental crisis, and addresses its
impact on countries of the Global South such as
Venezuela.</em></p>
<p><strong>It’s important to bring up the Global South’s
perspective on climate change in the context of
COP26. In </strong><strong><em>A People's Green New
Deal </em></strong><strong>you argue that so
called “green economies” (and in general the
proposals that we know as the Green New Deal-GND)
often replicate the existing logic of domination,
particularly when it comes to the Global South.
Briefly, can you explain your hypothesis?</strong></p>
<p>Mao put this simply: “Everything reactionary is the
same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall.” We can
add: you have to take aim to hit.</p>
<p>The great majority of progressive proposals take aim
neither at capitalism nor imperialism. In fact, they
are often blind to them. If we want to change the
world-system, we need to have a sense of what it is.
In the most general sense, drawing on Samir Amin, we
can say that it is a system of polarized accumulation,
producing great mountains of wealth, on the one hand,
and far larger seas of poverty, on the other. That is
a feature and not a bug of the system: the wealth
accumulated at the core of the system is stolen from
the periphery. To change that type of world-system,
you need first of all to strike at the current
mechanisms of value transfer from periphery to core.
Those include uneven exchange of values – or the core
receiving goods embodying more labor than those
embodied in its exports – and the core receiving goods
which concentrate more of the world’s resources than
those it exports. Another element is: ongoing
primitive accumulation, including the collapse of
peripheral sovereignty, as in Yemen and elsewhere,
which is part of safeguarding the petrodollar.</p>
<p>The 2010 <a
href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/cochabamba-people%E2%80%99s-agreement-stopping-climate-change"
moz-do-not-send="true">Cochabamba People’s Agreement</a>
went further. It recalled the (unrealized) Bandung-era
effort to achieve political and economic
decolonization and liberation. But the Cochabamba
Agreement added something new: we need to speak of
ecological decolonization. In other words, the global
ecology’s sinks for waste from CO2 emissions were not
just used. They were enclosed by the wealthy states.
Because that space cannot be restored in the short
term, southern states/peoples are owed some kind of
replacement: climate debt, to the tune of six percent
of northern GNP per year.</p>
<p>These are structural features of the world system.
Unless you identify them, target them, and strike at
them, they won’t fall. They will continue. So,
logically, the prevailing proposals for a GND, or for
a “green economy,” will simply reproduce the polarized
system if they do not take into account these logics,
diagnoses, structures, and demands. They will tend to
look away from the historical sources of wealth and
not support reparations. The point is that we cannot
subsist on a politics of GNDs based on slogans such as
“just transition,” “sustainable development,” or even
“a Green New Deal,” socialist or not, unless they
specifically mention these demands and the mechanisms
of uneven development.</p>
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<p><a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/files/images/%5Bsite-date-yyyy%5D/%5Bsite-date-mm%5D/climate_change_map.png"
title="This map shows that the countries of the
Global South are the most affected by climate
change. (University of Richmond)"
moz-do-not-send="true"><img
src="https://venezuelanalysis.com/files/styles/full_content/public/images/%5Bsite-date-yyyy%5D/%5Bsite-date-mm%5D/climate_change_map.png?itok=AIpbEXq0"
alt="This map shows that the countries of the
Global South are the most affected by climate
change. (University of Richmond)" title=""
style="margin-right: 0px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="452"
height="359"></a></p>
<div>
<p>This map shows that the countries of the Global
South are the most affected by climate change.
(University of Richmond)</p>
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</div>
</div>
<p><strong>With that in mind, what kind of
reorganization on a global scale is needed so that
the people of the Global South don't end up paying
the consequences of the climate crisis?</strong></p>
<p>There are five fundamental elements that are central
to reconfiguring North-South relations (the specific
internal texture of changes in the Global South’s
production and its ecological self-defense strategies
are different questions, clearly involving, as the
Bolivian leadership has said, food sovereignty and
sovereign industrialization among other measures).</p>
<p>One element is the demilitarization of the core
states. In effect, southern social movements advanced
this demand in the Cochabamba process when they
pointed out that the US spends as much on its military
as is demanded from the US in climate debt payments.
They called for “a new model of civilization in the
world without… war-mongering.” Demilitarization is
also necessary to achieve a “just transition,”
meaning, in concrete terms, stabilization if not
improvement in life outcomes for people in the
imperial core. Militarization amounts to a horrific
use of social surplus and industrial capacity, geared
at preserving world accumulation and guaranteeing
imperialist value flows. It needs to go.</p>
<p>Second, there needs to be a real respect for
sovereignty, and a political struggle to ensure that
respect. People in the North need to actively resist
their governments’ attempts to economically asphyxiate
the South and to impose unilateral coercive <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/sanctions-kill"
moz-do-not-send="true">sanctions</a>. That means the
abolition of the so-called “terror lists,” which are
primarily used to criminalize groups in the
Arab-Iranian region carrying out any defense of
national sovereignty or defense of anti-colonial
projects.</p>
<p>The basics of international law need to be respected,
including honoring the territorial sovereignty of
states like Venezuela and Syria. The latter is
occupied by US troops, without any protest from the
western left. The former suffers from paramilitary
infiltration from <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/tag/operation-gedeon"
moz-do-not-send="true">Colombia</a>, a US client
state – again without much objection from the western
left. Needless to say, removing external
destabilization does not mean that these countries
will suddenly produce autonomist socialist societies.
Rather, the removal of external aggression creates a
better atmosphere for internal social struggle aimed
at more democratic freedoms, internal social(ist)
redistribution, and ecological justice.</p>
<p>Third, there needs to be payment of climate debt.
Northern environmental movements have purposefully
suppressed this demand, inasmuch as they took distance
from the Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez governments, all
the while hypocritically expressing concern about
extractivism (which is an input into the commodities
and industrial processes that are key to northern
accumulation).</p>
<p>The Cochabamba People’s Agreement and the Bolivian
government specifically demanded six percent of
northern GNP, around $1.2 trillion from the US, and
around $3.2 trillion from the OECD on the whole. This
includes an adaptation debt, to help “Poor countries
and people who live daily with rising costs, damages
and lost opportunities for development,” and an
emissions debt, since “developed countries’ historical
and current excessive emissions are limiting
atmospheric space available to developing countries.”</p>
<p>Fourth, there should be a vast and immediate
reduction in fossil-energy use and emissions in the
Global North, as a consequence of their current and
worsening overuse of atmospheric sinks for CO2.</p>
<p>Fifth, there should be settler-decolonization,
including support for the national liberation
struggles of peoples still fighting against
settler-colonial domination in places like Palestine
and current-day Canada and the US.</p>
<p><strong>Some people argue for an anti-extractivist
solution to the crisis. On paper, that might appear
to be a great solution. However, people of course
actually live in places like Venezuela, Bolivia, and
Nigeria, and the conditions of dependency are such
that freezing production would be suicidal for them.
What policies should be pursued in the extractivist
economies of the periphery? </strong></p>
<p>One should acknowledge that anti-extractivist
campaigns often reflect real and desperate social
issues that people face. For example, people in
Bolivia and in Venezuela must deal with horrible
ecological harms of resource extraction in their
countries. Nevertheless, these anti-extractivist
campaigns in the North are often no more than weapons
against Third World development.</p>
<p>There is no possible industrialization in any part of
the world without resource extraction, especially of
minerals. Are people demanding that we live in
grass-covered knolls like hobbits? That extraction
will produce political, social, and ecological costs,
where it occurs is undeniable. The question is how to
balance those costs with the majority’s need to escape
poverty. There is obviously no simple answer. One
answer is to go back to the demands for changes in the
terms of trade, (“international action in favor of
fair and stable prices for [Third World] exports,” in
Ismail-Sabri Abdallah’s phrase).</p>
<p>My point here is both rhetorical and real: all things
being equal, if countries could produce half as much
lithium or anything else and receive the same
proceeds, then resolving difficult developmental
dilemmas would be easier. Instead, extractivist theory
leads to the “displacement of the debate over politics
and policy from North to South,” in the words of Sam
Moyo, Paris Yeros, and Praveen Jha. It sidesteps any
question of northerners’ responsibility for political
transformation (a cynic would say that is why this
discourse is so popular!). So one issue is serious
international activism around the terms of trade, with
the understanding that changes benefitting the Third
World, which are entirely possible, could immediately
enhance developmental possibilities.</p>
<p>In the words of the <a
href="https://osae-marsad.org/2019/05/02/building-food-sovereignty-in-tunisia/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Tunisian Observatory for Food
Sovereignty and the Environment</a>, “Faced with
this conflagration, the obligation to act falls upon
all, even if responsibility does not.” Countries
cannot simply wait. <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/interviews/14638"
moz-do-not-send="true">Venezuela, for example, needs
to return to its policies of two decades ago and
aggressively support peasant activists</a>’ efforts
for agrarian reform. Venezuela is a tremendously rich
country in terms of agricultural potential and that
potential needs to be realized. The country must be
able to feed itself, and furthermore needs to retain
more value locally through sovereign
industrialization, including a sovereign renewable
energy system that could jump-start such a process.</p>
<p>It would be good to have better terms of trade with
the West and China, but it would be better to retain
value through in situ industrialization. I have little
to say about the technicalities of protecting
Venezuelan farmers from cheaper imported food and an
overvalued currency. However, the current crisis,
including the kidnapping of <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/tag/alex-saab"
moz-do-not-send="true">Alex Saab</a>, is proof that
the basis of a national economy, where possible, is
food sovereignty with its capacity to keep inflation
under control.</p>
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<div>
<p>Chávez at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, when he
said “Let's not change the climate, let's change
the system!” (Archive)</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><strong>At the COP15 in Copenhagen, </strong><a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5013"
moz-do-not-send="true"><strong>Hugo Chávez said</strong></a><strong>:
“Let's not change the climate, let's change the
system!” More recently, Bolivian Vice President
David Choquehuanca made a call for an
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist approach to
climate change. Can you talk to us about these calls
from the Global South?</strong></p>
<p>The North is calling for reforms and
crisis-management, and for an essentially Keynesian
green shift in the industrial composition of the world
system. At best, it seeks a transition to socialism in
some undefined future moment, or points to unreal
solutions like space mining. By contrast, Chávez and
Choquehuanca stepped onto the world political stage,
in 2009 and 2021 respectively, and called for ending
capitalism. Choquehuanca clearly denounced “limitless
accumulation.” He spoke of the threats of “green
capitalism” when brought to bear on technologies in
the fields of biology, biotechnology, artificial
intelligence, and space colonization. Likewise, Chávez
spoke of “global imperial dictatorship,” and placed
the responsibility for dealing with climate change
primarily on the United States and its allies. They
clearly named the global-scale problems their
countries and the South confront and demanded a
solution for them.</p>
<p>Can we deal with climate change in a way that
achieves liberation and justice for all of the
oppressed world – including oppressed, alienated,
exploited, and colonized people in the core countries
– without following these two leaders in identifying
capitalism and imperialism as the systems destroying
the planet? Is it any wonder that people find it more
comfortable to discuss Venezuelan and Bolivian
extractivism in the imperial core countries, rather
than try to respond to the analysis they put forward
and the politics which derive from it?</p>
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