Theories of Political Ecology with Max Ajl

In this episode Max Ajl returns to the podcast. Max Ajl is an educator and a researcher and the author of A People’s Green New Deal, which we highly recommend and had a previous discussion of back in 2021. He is also the associate editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. We caught up with Max back in early August to talk about one of his recent pieces, from Agrarian South. The article is entitled “Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet.”  It’s a very interesting article that covers a range of ostensibly left-wing approaches to ecology and the ecological crisis through a critical lens. Recording this conversation in the middle of summer there were a number of events and conversations we reference that folks will recall. This will be a two-part release. In this first portion we talk about the theory of ecologically unequal exchange, wheat and cereal grains as weapons of imperialism, bananas and fresh fruits in the first world, and get into some of Alj’s critiques of different strains of political ecology. In particular in this episode Max talks about Andreas Malm’s formulation of “Fossil Capitalism,” and also critically engages with the frameworks of eco-modernism and extractivism.  Ajl challenges the euro-centric variants of Marxism that dominate much of the first-world Marxist engagement with ecological questions, raising the importance of bringing anti-imperialist analysis, a world-system level understanding of capitalism and solidarity with national liberation movements into the theory and practice of ecological movements.  We will link the article we discuss in the show notes as well as some of the articles that Max mentions in the discussion.  In part two of this conversation which will come out in a few days, we will talk a little more about eco-modernism and get into degrowth as well. This is our first episode of the month of October, we thankfully hit our goal of new patrons for the last month. And have set a goal once again to add 40 new patrons this month to keep up with nonrenewals and hopefully slowly increase our base of support for the show. Thanks to everyone who contributes. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism   Links/Citations: “Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet.” by Max Ajl (the subject of the episode) Patrick Higgins articles referenced Charlotte Kates article referenced Archana Prasad mentioned