Upstream Podcast; The Exhausted of the Earth with Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Episode released 19th November 2024
Transcript by Flourish Economics 6th January 2025

Speaker 1 - 00:00:00
One. Hundred.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:00:19
You consistently see people citing this, basically saying like, things are not working for me anymore. At all. And then people will respond with like, well, here's. Look. American GDP is way better than European GDP, right? In OECD states.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:00:35
And that has no meaning to actual lived experience of what it is to be in our societies. Whether you are employed, whether you are unemployed, whether you're in a surplus population, whether you're a migrant worker working in agricultural sector, whether you are in fact a downwardly mobile worker in a white collar sector, the actual objective reality and the feeling of this is totally different than that sort of mirage.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:01:03
And I will call it a mirage. And it was limited as well. To it's only certain segments of the population of the what the French call the 30. Glorious years, where it was like, oh, a rising tide raises all ships. So therefore, if the firms are doing better, I'm doing better. If the state's doing better, I'm doing better.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:01:18
That's gone. And some people say, well, bring that back. Well, first a you can't do it. The conditions have changed. B something better is out there. You are listening to upstream

Speaker 3 - 00:01:29
Upstream, upstream.

Speaker 4 - 00:01:31
Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to.

Speaker 5 - 00:01:37
Unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. Exhaustion. What a perfect and powerful word to describe our times. Exhausted bodies, overworked over productive.

Speaker 5 - 00:01:53
Overstretched bodies pushed to their limits, treated like machines whose sole existence is to produce profit Exhausted ecosystems extracted. Ruined. Plundered. Viewed as nothing but raw material for the ceaseless flow of capital accumulation.

Speaker 5 - 00:02:15
Exhausted. Minds. Hurried and harried. No time for joy, for introspection, for pondering the cosmos. Our minds are tethered to an orbit delineated by distraction, denial and despair.

Speaker 5 - 00:02:31
Exhaustion. 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, and unless you've been consciously avoiding it, you've probably seen the videos of devastating floods, wildfires and once in a thousand year storms that are increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives.

Speaker 5 - 00:02:50
The reality of climate change is no longer one of the future one that can be framed in a discussion about coming generations. It's here already. And it's not even a question anymore. Of capitalism being the driving factor. That's an old conversation.

Speaker 5 - 00:03:07
The question now is, what are we going to do about it? How do we respond right now? AJ Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and core faculty member specialising in social and political theory and author of the Exhausted of the Earth Politics in a Burning World, published by Repeater Books.

Speaker 5 - 00:03:35
In this episode, we analyse and unpack the many forms of exhaustion that shape us and our world today. We explore the politics of climate change from right wing climate responses to those coming from the left.

Speaker 5 - 00:03:51
We explore the extractive circuit of capitalism as it stretches its tentacles from lithium mines in the DRC to DoorDash drivers in the suburbs of the west. We explore imperialism, Marxist theory.

Speaker 5 - 00:04:06
Revolutionary class's revolutionary strategies and why the exhausted of the Earth are the mass political subject of our times. And before we get started. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded, we couldn't keep this project going without your support.

Speaker 5 - 00:04:25
There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes at least one a month, but usually more. Along with our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes at Patreon.com forward slash, upstream podcast, and you can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one time donation on our website.

Speaker 5 - 00:04:52
Upstream podcast. Org forward slash support through your support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you.

Speaker 5 - 00:05:08
In advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Ajay, it is great to have you on the show.

Robert - 00:05:29
Thank you.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:05:29
Robert, it's great to be here. I am wondering if we can start.

Robert - 00:05:33
Maybe with just a introduction, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:05:42
Hi. My name is Ajay Singh Chaudhary. I'm the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and our core faculty member specialising in social and political theory. There's a lot to say about Brooklyn Institute, which I probably won't right now, other than we're a very, very large education and research organisation, principally giving seminars to working adults.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:06:03
All around the country and the world. Um, and this particular work is something I've been researching and then writing for a very long time. And almost embarrassingly long time. It came about because, frankly, I thought that there wasn't a lot of sort of soup to nuts.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:06:20
Political theory concerning climate and that climate was to me. Like the issue. That like sort of not only like I'm not trying to get to like supremacy. Like it's not like only issue, but it was the sort of issue of connective tissue between.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:06:37
So many different crises that we're facing. And it has many unique properties and unique qualities that make it extremely difficult to just sort of staple climate onto existing political theories and ways of doing politics.

Robert - 00:06:53
Mhm, mhm. So yeah. Actually we're here to talk all about that. And, and talk all about the exhausted of the earth. So I'd love it if maybe you could just go a little bit deeper and sort of help us understand a little bit more.

Robert - 00:07:10
Even though you kind of just laid this out. But what did you really hope to accomplish with the book when you set out to write it? And what were sort of the main theses or the main points that you were hoping to convey to readers when you were writing it?

Robert - 00:07:27
Sure, absolutely.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:07:28
Yeah. I kind of gave a short version of this at the top. I'm happy to go further. Well, the first thing I should say about the exhaustion angle is it's not the one that I actually like. Set out. Looking for. I set out to do like, okay, I'm going do political theory of climate change and then to me, what does that mean?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:07:45
It means I need to be able to answer a of a who what, when, where, why, how kind. All those kind of basic questions that people might ask and especially I just read this, but especially in ways that deal with the unique aspects of climate change for pre-existing political theory one of which is the intensity and scope of the phenomenon.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:08:06
Right? It is extremely it's effects are far reaching. Let's put it, that way. It's causes are far reaching and it's timeline is very, very short. And there's not like a lot of redos. So one of the classic examples I give whatever part of the political spectrum you're on is usually you, a lot of your political thinking and a lot of your political strategizing is like, well, if we don't get it this year, we'll get them next time.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:08:34
Or like, okay, we're going to regroup and spend ten years working on this and spread out our like organisational cells and things like this. Well, climate kind of throws a spanner in that. And there was a lot of really great work. Coming out when I started this project.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:08:51
But most of it was focusing very much on like single aspects of the climate crisis or maybe providing some policy positions. But very little that was trying to sort of do this true sort of total political theory that does what I, what I hope the book does.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:09:10
And then along the way of trying to do that and to do it. Seriously, so it required learning a lot of natural science as much as I could. I don't come from a natural science background, but I know more than the average bear and I talk about that in the book. So I tried to sort of learn all that material, but also that's where the exhaustion stuff enters in, because both in the ecological literatures and then in the social literatures that I was sort of working from, and researching you could not escape this as a phenomenon.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:09:39
And not just as this kind of like allegorical or metaphorical one that literally as I sort of try to describe in the second chapter of the book. You can sort of trace out and see what I call the extractive circuit, right? These, these sort of. Zones of extraction and exhaustion across the world that do, in fact, sort of crisscross what some people call the sort of metabolic relation between society and its ecological niche or you could just say simply, yeah, that sort of bridge or a constantly crossing over what we might describe as society and its ecological niche

Robert - 00:10:15
Mhm, mhm. Yeah. I really resonated with the centring of exhaustion. Yeah. People feel it man. Yeah. Yeah.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:10:22
I mean there's more to I mean I should. Actually have added that the other thing about exhaustion that in addition to just seeing everywhere is more than a lot of classical categories. So like I could have written this and used like very classic categories like I do use many of them, like exploitation.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:10:39
Alienation, things like that. But this is the one that people would openly profess in their own words as what they are feeling currently. And I think that's very important. And I also think it's really interesting to because it just so happened that I had on my bookshelf in the stack of books that I'm kind of making my way through.

Robert - 00:11:00
Uh, old gods. New Enigmas by Mike Davis. Oh, that's so funny. And yeah. As I started reading it, I realised that, like you both had sort of part of part of what you're doing is a shared project of finding a revolutionary class in Lake capitalist society.

Robert - 00:11:16
Now. Right? Like this idea that the classic proletariat working class right people that are currently engaged in, like wage labour are not only. Like vastly not the majority of sort of the population.

Robert - 00:11:33
So that we can't necessarily map on the analyses that Marx made about the working class and just apply them mechanically onto where we're at now. And like this project of looking for, you know, who is the revolutionary class now, what are the revolutionary classes?

Robert - 00:11:48
What ties them together? What sort of overlaps are there that we can sort of tap into when we begin to analyse how we might fight against some of the stuff that you're talking about in the book. So, yeah, I thought that was a very interesting parallel. And I don't know if there's anything else that you want to add to that or say to that before we kind of, you know, go through and talk about.

Robert - 00:12:09
Oh, absolutely.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:12:10
I'll say some. Just very quickly One is, you know, the way you put it, like, right, wage labour. ET cetera. ET cetera. Is ever so slightly different than, you know, Marxist class theory. Marx himself never actually really fully wrote up class theory.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:12:25
You know, it was like he planned. I think 4 or 5 volumes of capital and never actually got to all of them. And yes, this idea that got developed, especially towards the end of the late 19th century, that it's the urban industrial proletariat that is the sort of true working class.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:12:43
And then you get like maybe concentric circles of other people around this that seems to not be the clearest case on Earth. There are lots of people who are like Proletarianised or are experiencing downward mobility, or these kinds of things. So we can talk about those boundaries or those sort of blocks.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:13:01
We can talk about. Of course, especially in the global South, peasants. But also in the global North, you know, a small landholders which is a dicey. Category in Marxism because that's sort of petty bourgeois and this is also one of the reasons why I turned to Fanon. So much. There's a lot of reasons, but one of them is that he's like, look, in a lot of these real situations of decolonisation, I do think there's a kind of isomorphism between decolonisation and climate politics.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:13:27
He's like, you have to sort of stretch things around a bit. And when you're dealing with the real world and not just a pure sort of plane of abstraction, you're often dealing with an imprecise and sort of stretched and complex object.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:13:44
And in many ways, this is not a shocking observation of Fanon's, because if you look at any of the sort of great whether you're talking revolutionary politics or even reformist movements, they're almost always coalitional imprecise. They don't capture everyone.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:14:00
And as we approach the contemporary day, and I think this is where you were sort of referencing, we have this proliferation of surplus population of people who are just in the sort of way in which I use it, and I think many other folks who are coming out of Marxian traditions use it.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:14:16
Are just not necessarily a hate to even use this word, but like, need it for the function of capitalism. Like, capitalism is like, yeah, they can live or die and we've got replacement population enough to deal with that. And it's like the coldest way of looking at the world.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:14:31
But it is kind of reflecting the realities we live in. Mhm. Yeah. Sorry. That's not very like cheery. I guess

Robert - 00:14:41
Well we're not really a cheery podcast necessarily. We try, we try to. But I mean how the f*** are you going to do that right now. You know I think we have to be real about what's going on. Well, that's part of the goal of the book. Yeah.

Robert - 00:14:56
Um, speaking of which, you take some time examining this idea of right wing climate realism. Which, um, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to shift back to explicitly talking about climate change for a minute here. And talk about this idea of right wing climate realism and why, when it comes to the impacts of climate change, as I think you titled the first chapter of your book, where, quote, not in this together.

Robert - 00:15:21
Yeah.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:15:22
Okay. So the right wing climate realism thing in many ways is actually like the proper introduction to the book, the book's a little weird. Structurally, right? I got this kind of like prologue, and then we just jump right in. But chapter one is actually kind of an overview in some ways. And it starts off with right wing climate realism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:15:39
So why there's a couple of reasons, but so I'll try to give this in a sort of as brief a form as I can. You know, I tend to be a little wordy, but nonetheless again. When I was starting on this project, but sadly still, to this day, a lot of folks, including and again, this is a pretty broad section of the political spectrum.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:16:00
So I'm not just talking about centre right, centre left here, but also left, left and to a degree, right. But we'll talk about that in a moment. Still sort of approach climate as this. Like, oh, if you believe in like, you know, those like yard signs right.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:16:16
You stick them in the ground and it's like this house we believe in science. Well first of all, like the, the scientific endeavour is not supposed to be the kind of thing that requires this. Like Kierkegaardian leap of faith into the unknown. Right? Like it's actually this, like probabilistic.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:16:33
Like, you know, I mean, there's different ways of presenting the scientific method from different aspects of, of the theoretical and applied sciences. But like one thing, they basically share is like, this is like probabilistically true knowledge that you do not need, like deep metaphysical commitments to believe in.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:16:51
But secondly. Like there is a kind of like phantom scientism. Hiding behind that, that, oh, if only everyone believed the facts, then we'd all do the correct politics. Right? And what I had discovered very quickly in my earliest research and then it was just plainly obvious, as I spread out.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:17:11
And you don't find this by reading like the New York Times, you find this by reading. Like trade journals and like investor reports and stuff like this. Was that a lot of the people we would, I think. Associate with the right and be like, I talk a lot. I joke about Rex Tillerson because I wrote that part.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:17:26
During the first Trump administration. I'm like, Rex is not a dumb guy. Rex. So people don't recognise the name, right? Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, former Secretary of State of the United States. Like he's not an idiot. And in fact, he is very open about being.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:17:44
Like climate change is real. And all this kind of stuff. But Rex just looks at the numbers and is like, so you're telling me or someone like Rex, it's not personal as I say in the book, if Rex like had a come to Jesus moment and was like, oh my God, let's not destroy the world, they just fire him and hire someone else to do that work or whoever is the new CEO of ExxonMobil.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:18:03
So. Like part of the reality is, yes, you have L***** Tunes. People like Donald Trump or like, who is the guy with the snowball in Congress? James Inhofe, like right. Who are actual climate deniers? But right here in the United States, the world capital of climate denial, which is 100% true.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:18:21
It's an ultra minority position at this point, even on the right, it's like 20 or 30%. It's tiny and when you read all these more serious right wing pieces or analyses of climate, you don't come away with denialism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:18:36
You just you come away with a different version of their climate plan. And it stretches from sort of pretty prosaic stuff to some pretty extreme stuff. And might say pretty extreme. I mean, very extreme. So the more prosaic, simple answer that I think begins to answer the we're not in this together is that for the vast majority of people on Earth, which doesn't just mean global South versus global North, but also like majorities.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:19:04
Just smaller within the global North. The sort of most basic. And again, this is barely even like Marxist social theory. This is all like a kind of quasi utilitarianism. Like for the vast majority of people doing it thorough and doing it fast.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:19:20
Right? Mitigation and adaptation is in our best interest for like a million different angles. Not only an ecological angle, but also like a social quality of life angle from almost any way you look at it. That's great. The sort of first sort of way of understanding right wing climate realism is folks looking at those same numbers and same data and being like, oh f***!

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:19:43
Though, if we just go a little slower, if we're not. So thorough, if we. Yeah, okay. So we're going to hit 3 to 4 degrees, change over industrial baseline. Right now. Climate scientists will like be like holy f***, don't do that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:19:59
That sounds f****** horrific. But again the calculus is pretty straightforward. It's like yeah. Okay. So you're telling me we're going to probably lose capacity for like a billion people. There's going to be. Or like several hundred more million people are going to be refugees. You know, this kind of stuff.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:20:15
But I don't have to spend. Like $70 trillion or like, either destroy that amount of value or redistribute it right now. Well, I choose that. Right. That's the sort of beginning of right wing communism. It's slower and like willing to say, f*** off to a whole bunch of people.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:20:33
The more sort of radical stuff that I get to quite quickly is that and this is, again, where I think the of truth of not siloing climate issues into just like climate policy is so important. If you look at the increased attention for example, to borders in recent years and policing them, that is a good right wing.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:20:53
Good. I'm not saying good as like a normative position here. A realistic right wing response to increased human migration driven by socioeconomic and socio ecological factors.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:21:08
Right? It's not the response I want, but it's totally it does. In fact make sense. If you look at the United States. Military, there's all this retrofitting for different kinds of sea levels for different kinds of salinisation points in the ocean and things like this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:21:26
And there's not like the nothing people are willing to do. Some stuff on the on the right from the sort of capital side, but it's like extremely slow and extremely limited. And then again, this stretches all the way. Then to the right, and I do talk about this again in that first chapter with the sort of eco fascist formations.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:21:45
I focussed, particularly on Europe, because that's where they're like actually in power, like, you can find. Like right now, the German Greens are like the most militarised, like they're one of the most pro like war parties in Germany, which is f****** wild in Austria.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:22:04
I talk about Austria. There's like the far right and the greens, they're version of the greens, like running together or making government coalitions. And the joke. And sadly, this didn't make it into the book because some of the stuff came out later. The joke I started making.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:22:21
That's not very funny. When I was talking about this book in Europe, is like the sort of pitch of that stuff is like, good, clean living for good, clean people. And like, let's make sure that, like the darker peoples, the unwanteds, the pause, the homeless.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:22:38
Whatever that they don't like. Eat up all of our precious resources. And this is kind of dumb and malthusianism. We can sort of make fun of it. And laugh, but its serious politics and it's not dumb. Politics either. And I think that's the other side of what I want to get at with right wing climate realism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:22:55
This idea that the right is dumb and that it has no projects of its own. Seems to be. Completely wrongheaded. It has projects of its own, and it seems to. Actually have a pretty decent understanding of the world One of my favourite examples of this I do cite in the book, but it's in one of those like 8 billion word footnotes.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:23:12
So I'm not sure if everyone reads it, but like in the first Trump administration, one of his departments and I forget which put out, you know, the overarching policy was let's repeal the Obama era. Like tailpipe emission standards and what this like 800 page Trump administration report did was not this like exercise in climate denialism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:23:32
It was actually very realistic in this sort of shocking. But also like frightening way where they're like these tailpipe emission standards compared to the scale of the problem. Are just meaningless, like literally they will have no effect on the problem. So why even bother?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:23:49
I mean, it's like 800 pages of this, but that is in fact true. It is in fact truer than the like, oh, we want a small little victory with tailpipe emissions regulations

Robert - 00:24:00
Yeah, a victory which you can sort of hold up. And then use to sort of trick people into thinking that you've done something and you can say, yeah, I'm serious about climate.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:24:09
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert - 00:24:10
Absolutely. You mentioned the extractive circuit and I do really love that way that you framed that. I don't know if you that's something that you came up with yourself or if that's just a. Oh yeah. That's an original term.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:24:22
Yeah.

Robert - 00:24:22
I really appreciate it because it does such a good job of sort of describing these zigzagging networks of like global value chains. And you talk about. Like literal cast and slave labour and all of these other components that go into creating actually existing capitalism.

Robert - 00:24:38
And, you know, I'm wondering if you can maybe just talk a little bit more about the extractive circuit, maybe illustrating it with some examples. If you think that might help to draw it out for people. And then maybe I might poke and prod a little bit more to to ask you more.

Robert - 00:24:53
But I'd love if we could just start off with in your own words, like how you would describe that

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:24:58
Yeah, I'll do my absolute best. I will admit, as I have many times on both interviews like this and sort of other written. Things, it's far and away the most technical part of the book. So it's a little hard to explain very quickly, but I will say that like what it is supposed to be is a portrait of what capitalism is like.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:25:20
Plugged back into its ecological context and I'm not the first person to try this, but I really try to show just how interconnected these things are. Tracing sites of production, distribution, and consumption.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:25:37
Right? And also problematising some of those categories in ways that might come out. I think in some of the follow ups. But in a nutshell. Right. And you say like. Maybe we can use an example. So I'll use my favourite example, the, the cell phone. Right. Or the smartphone. I use this in class all the time because it's just very convenient commodity to explain things.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:25:56
So if I'm talking about. Or if you're like interested in the history of capitalism and things like this, right. You can think back to like, oh, there was like the Fordist factory at one point, right where and the genius of the Ford is factory is everything is is within the factory walls.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:26:13
Right? So like over there is like your, your tire guys over there is your axle guys over here is your chassis guys over here is your design guys over here is your final construction guys, right? It's all just kind of like in the same zone. Yada yada yada. And then you even get like, Taylor ization of stuff like that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:26:30
So, like, real sort of management science, like, let's make this as efficient as possible. As we approach the present day, it's not that we're on Post-fordism, which is something people already were talking about, like way back in the day. And then especially when neoliberalism. But with fully globalised production of commodity, like a smartphone, is made in like 80 something places, it's hard for me to even remember, you know, it could probably be higher or maybe a little bit lower, but it's very large.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:26:59
So you've got things like, you know, design firms and coding. Happening in places like California, but also being outsourced to places like Southeast Asia. You've got chip manufacturing, principally in places like Taiwan, but, you know, a little bit.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:27:14
Elsewhere. Final construction China. One of the things I focus on a lot in the book, just as a really good illustration of just how extreme this stuff is, is the cobalt mining in a place like Democratic Republic of Congo? Literal slave labour, literal child labour people holding guns.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:27:32
So other people work for free. I mean, I don't know how much more of a pure definition of slavery. You can get all of that goes into the phone, right? And then if we're thinking about those minds, those are also ecological sacrifice zones.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:27:47
If we're thinking about carbon emissions or other greenhouse gas emissions. Right. Something like, again, I'm not going to get the exact number, right, but a 78%, I believe, of the emissions right. Are in the final construction. So that's all going on.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:28:03
The technical national accounts of China. Even if, like, I don't know, the phones being used in Norway or in Queens, where I live, right. And then by the way, also in a lot of the climate treaties. Things like shipping things like aviation aren't always counted.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:28:21
So it becomes this really sort of horrifying, vicious cycle where like globalisation was initially used to like spread comparative advantage and then it became. Also entwined with what is variously called like, sort of just in time production or lean production, whatnot.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:28:40
All this stuff that is incredibly tight to keep up margins because margins are global growth has been slowing for a long time. Margins can be harder to achieve, although you can still get very high margins by becoming a very large corpus. Things like this. But one of the ways of doing this is to do this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:28:56
Kind of just in time stuff, which is great for profits, great for managers, great for owners, fantastic stuff. Again. I hope people understand that I'm seeing fantastic from their point of view, but if you're talking about like the workers trying to like put the s*** together or the people being forced to mine for this, or the people who are trying to like, I know.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:29:19
Just do. Delivery and stuff like this on the last mile as it said in the business, this is like nightmare conditions. That's without even getting into some of the stuff I get into the book. Where you find again. This actually touches on your your opening question about the working class. It's not that I'm against class theory at all.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:29:35
I just think we do really do need to stretch things. So like for example, one of the things I point out is like a refugee is hard to describe as being exploited in the classic Marxist sense. But tech companies have figured it out. You know and one of the ways is to hand.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:29:52
People some apps and have them use them while they're in f****** detention centres. And refugee camps and collect a bunch of data on how people use things. And you can just squeeze a little more value, a little more profit out of things. And that is, I think the nature of the extractive circuit and the other thing to again, put this back into climatological terms is there's all these debates about decoupling and absolute decoupling and relative decoupling, but when you look at this global scale, at this real thing, which is not national border production, that doesn't mean like nations are gone and imperialism and stuff like that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:30:27
It's gone. It doesn't mean that at all. But what it does mean is that the ecological effects and what we need to be measuring are global and globally, we see actually something far, far different from either absolute or even relative decoupling, which is that in fact, we have a slowing global growth curve.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:30:47
And an increasing amount of both sort of what's called material throughput. And the technical natural scientific literature and the sort of ecological economics literature which people can think of more prosaically or more colloquially as just like the amount of stuff that's going into things is increasing and also, of course, if we want to use the most carbon focussed atmospheric carbon concentration is increasing.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:31:14
It's not bending down. Although I have minor hopes that it might in coming years. Can you talk a little bit about the.

Robert - 00:31:22
I think I love the example of the smartphone and we actually recently talked to Vijay Prashad on the DRC. Oh, wonderful. And talking about Glencore. And you know, the horrific conditions in those mines.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:31:35
Some of the same material. Some of the very same material

Robert - 00:31:38
Yeah. So very a very nice overlap for our listeners. But I also was really interested in the other side of the extractive circuit when it comes to smartphones and this idea, you talk about how like exhaustion is profitable and I'd like to read a passage.

Robert - 00:31:58
Actually from the book where you describe the growing arsenal of of services like DoorDash or Amazon Prime delivery. So this is a quote from the book. We should see these quote services instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives as shifting literal time and energy.

Robert - 00:32:15
Not to these individual consumers, but rather to the needs of an always on capitalism creating the very crises to which these services respond. They don't strictly fulfil consumption ends. They are also part of production. Every moment of life is integrated, profitable from literal labour hours to the production of micro units of digital value via social media and other avenues.

Robert - 00:32:40
In the hours for what we will end. Quote. And that just. I really appreciated that whole section and the way that profit is just squeezed out of our exhausted bodies and our exhausted world so thoroughly by capital.

Robert - 00:32:57
And it just made me really think about the profitability of exhaustion as you put it in the book. In many different ways. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that too, and how, like a lot of the apps that we use and also the way that you bring in Mark Fisher's work and capitalist realism and how it's just almost impossible to think outside of the reality of capitalism and this is like related to the way that our exhaustion and the productivity and the always on ness of our lives is such a thorough part of this whole extractive circuit.

Robert - 00:33:34
And the way that profit is squeezed out of us and all these different ways from from the slave labour and the DRC to DoorDash delivery, you know, it's all connected through exhaustion. Yeah, I'm really happy you brought this up.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:33:47
I actually get a chance to talk about this part of that chapter, too much. And it's one of my favourites because, yeah, a lot of times when we talk about these kinds of services, we do discuss them as consumption and part of the sort of broader, more analytic part of that whole extractive circuit portrait is to show also how very disparate peoples facing very disparate challenges in very disparate ways.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:34:13
Like, I'm not trying to say like a slave labourer in the DRC. Is like the same thing as like a, you know, lower middle class, like, what did I say? Like like office worker in California, right. That is not my point at all. My point, though, is that they are connected through these systems and the person who capital sort of decides to have one of these things.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:34:36
It's not just this kind of like frivolous device. Right? Like, you have to get it right and you have to buy the new one, and you have to upgrade to I don't know. Windows 11. Apparently that's got an email about that this morning. You have to do these things, not because you want to, not because you desire to.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:34:55
And this is where I get into some of those, like services as well, right. Like partly people turn to these things out of desperation because they are facing time binds and then ironically, right. The person who is they are like, I mean by the like.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:35:13
Letter of the law. Now, like like semi-free contracting with even though that's completely b*******. Are themselves using the same tools to figure out how to squeeze just a little more out of themselves. Right? So, like on the one hand, you've got the people who like extreme exploitation.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:35:32
Extreme exhaustion. Going into the like, production end. But then a lot of the consumption end is also production, right? You know, I make up these characters, right. But they're not characters. That's sort of a thought experiment or philosophical anthropology. They're real people, basically.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:35:47
Because what phones do for that sort of like low tier office worker. Right? It allows her to work longer hours predominantly and how does she make up for that time? Well, she has a second shift because we never like, dealt with gender parity in this country or any other.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:36:05
Frankly. And so she outsources it to this other person. Right. And often I think we would think of these people as being an antagonistic relationship. And part of the exhaustion frame and part of using them. These kinds of people to illustrate what's happening in the extractive circuit is hopefully to see for people to see there is a shared ground that exists today that did not exist maybe 60, 70, 80 years ago for Solidarities across what might seem like unlikely barriers or borders actually, that idea of solidarity.

Robert - 00:36:41
Shared through this sort of broader idea of exhaustion is, um, I found it really interesting and there's like certain passages where you talk about the fruits of imperialism. Sort of drying up because, you know, this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

Robert - 00:37:00
This idea that there is like a period where the spoils of colonialism and imperialism did accrue somewhat, you know, even if they were still just crumbs to a certain substratum of the working class. Right? And that led to that class investing itself.

Robert - 00:37:15
Somewhat. If not consciously, on a cellular level to the whole imperialist project in a way. And there was this sort of by in which feels like is not really there anymore. It feels like that's in decline. And as you write in the book, and I think, you know, you're drawing here from the work of Samir Amin when you talk about imperialism, rent.

Robert - 00:37:36
Right. Like this. Idea that imperialism rent is now flowing increasingly into the coffers of capital and less and less of the fruits of imperialist oppression and super exploitation and extraction, less and less of that is being, quote, enjoyed, end quote, by by those of us in the West and actually have a quote here from the book you write for the first time in modern history, the vast majority of workers and communities in the global North have a mundane material interest in the wealth and power of people and states in the global South.

Robert - 00:38:15
And so, drawing on this, the end of your last response, where you were talking about this sort of solidarity. I'd love it if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:38:23
Absolutely. This is another really important point, and it ties into some of the extractive circuit stuff, because I think most people or not most, a lot of people have heard probably what I think of as a pretty decent account of the sort of rise of neoliberalism, intellectual history of this stuff goes way back, but it's particularly looking at the early 70s.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:38:44
As this inflection point when it started to become very difficult to maintain. That kind of like payoff that imperialism rent wood guarantee to use a means term, right there became less room for manoeuvre again. Global growth curves start, start slowing down.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:39:02
I mean, that was very early that really hit later. But right. The. Starts to be a crisis in capital and this both sort of plays out on this kind of like. Labour discipline. Level. You start getting like really wild stuff in the early 70s. So for example one of the best examples I think I actually use this in the book is autoworkers in the US.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:39:22
Demanding not like higher wages, but being like I want to design the car, you know, like like a real. Like that is like means of like, you know, taking over the means of production. So being like, I'm pretty sure I know how to make a car better than you do. Like that kind of stuff.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:39:38
And so it hits this sort of crisis. Point And one of the things that happens with the institution of things like globalisation, those lean production methods, just in time, all that kind of stuff that I was talking about before. Is it all it manages to claw back for the capital, share as against the Labour share now this is very classic standard.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:40:00
I would say Marxian understanding of neoliberalism, yada yada yada yada. What you're talking about is to me, even more important, which is like, if I'm like a 1955 French, I don't know, I don't want to keep using autoworkers some other worker.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:40:18
Whether they be in almost any sector. Are British or American, whatever, doesn't really matter. I did for a brief period of time, like if the national economy is doing well, I'm doing well. If like I work for Ford and Ford is doing well, I am doing well.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:40:35
And so yes, I love how the way you put it, it can be conscious, it can be unconscious, but nonetheless, I have both sort of objective interests, but also perhaps psychological unconscious investments. So we can talk about this in two different ways.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:40:50
In the success of of my employer and in the success of my country. And increasingly, as we get to today and this can seem sort of like I'm looking for a silver lining in hard. There is a lot of disaggregation there. I think. Let's go back to the previous question.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:41:06
An example like those guys doing the last mile delivery for Amazon, not very attached. Or the people working in Amazon warehouses. Not very attached to Amazon as like a libidinal investment. Nor as a like objective one.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:41:23
Pretty upset. About their working conditions and like, I hate to like, use election stuff because I feel like election analysis is like a vortex into which everything gets sucked in and dies. But you also see this I think, in the pattern of global blow it up elections that have been happening for the past.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:41:40
Now, decade plus, where sort of any opportunity within. I don't consider Western democracies to actually be a democracies. I think we should have stop using that word. We don't live in them. They don't really exist. But anytime people are given. Like any access to choice, they're like, I choose blow it up and that to me is also decent evidence.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:42:01
I try not to overuse polls. I'm very sceptical. I use a lot of polling and survey data in the book, but I hope in a of sceptical way that I try to explain. But simply to say that this is all very good evidence that these things are disaggregating.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:42:17
Very few people and the thing I was going to say about the election before. In addition to the blow it up character, is the ways in which you consistently see people citing this basically saying like, things are not working for me anymore at all.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:42:32
And then people will respond with like, well. Here's. Look, American GDP is way better than European GDP. Right? You OECD states. And that has no meaning to actual lived experience of what it is to be in our societies, whether you are employed, whether you are unemployed, whether you're in a surplus population, whether you're a migrant worker working in agricultural sector, whether you are in fact a downwardly mobile worker in a white collar sector, the actual objective reality and the feeling of this is totally different than that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:43:07
Sort of mirage. And I will call it a mirage. And it was limited as well to its only certain segments of the population of what the French call the 30. Glorious Years, where it was like, oh, a rising tide raises all ships. So therefore, if the firms are doing better, I'm doing better.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:43:22
If the state's doing better, I'm doing better. That's gone. And some people say, well, bring that back. Well first a you can't do it. Conditions have changed, B something better is out there, which is a part of the project that is outlined here, which is that actually a sustainable life, even if you don't give a flying f*** about the environment.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:43:42
But all the things you would have to do to achieve a sustainable ecological life just so happened. This is actually not just so happened. This is part of why the extractive material is so important. Are what would address the conditions of exhaustion and discontent in society.

Robert - 00:44:00
Yeah, so really presenting this of the humanism within it is apparent, right? Like we can all think about the moralistic arguments, why we should be in solidarity with the global South, etc., but also just from an objective. Sort of material outlook.

Robert - 00:44:17
May I add just one thing? Absolutely, yeah. A really clear example of this that I use in the book.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:44:22
And that I also think is very illustrative of people are just like hearing this material for the first time. The other thing that globalised that people forget is like security surveillance and like all kinds of stuff like this. So sometimes it's literally the same corporations, the same firms, even sometimes the same personnel who are like going back and forth from like policing those mines in Central Africa to like Strikebreaking.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:44:47
And I don't know. North America. Like literally the same security firms. So like if the Congo for example, were to to achieve a level of sovereignty above neo-colonialism, it would actually for example, aid unionisation efforts in like Toronto.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:45:06
Like these things are all now. So deeply interconnected that there's all kinds of new, both political and sort of quasi utopian horizons to open up

Robert - 00:45:17
Right? Another thing on that connection with surveillance, etc. when you think about how a lot of the police forces in the United States trained with the IDF, it's a very good example in Israel, for example. A very direct connection there between Gaza and our major cities.

Robert - 00:45:35
Yeah.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:45:35
And in fact, if you're someone who's a crazy person like me and you read. Trade journals and stuff, that is also how Israel sold a lot of its weapons systems. It was like battle tested on the most hardcore terrorists. And the most hard populations to control.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:45:52
And who buys this stuff? A lot of the Western, like there's always been this over in Israel, and it's very complicated, whatever. But one of the ones that I think underlines the current sort of extreme over in the West right now is that a lot of countries.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:46:09
A lot of political actors, parties, corporations like bought this line and were like, oh, if we just buy this surveillance tech. This will work for our camps. This will work for our borders, this will work for our undesirable urban and rural populations. And we can just use this s*** and we'll just be fine.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:46:27
And then, like, I mean, people will think I'm a crazy for saying this. So you can cut it if you want. You know, Hamas comes out and like for all what you might think one way or the other about what happened, like the very least, you have to acknowledge that they showed that you could, in fact, fight through these systems with some pretty low technology solutions Your listening to an upstream conversation with AJ Singh Chaudhary.

Speaker 5 - 00:46:57
We'll be right back. Place.

Speaker 5 - 00:49:20
I live.

Speaker 7 - 00:49:21
Has a name But there's another one. Older Emerging through the mist I saw where I was as it was before we called it anything

Speaker 1 - 00:49:45
Now we live in the wreckage of a colonising force whose racist? Poisons still flows

Speaker 7 - 00:49:55
So scared of a moment of discomfort.

Speaker 1 - 00:49:59
Now we turn away. From the obvious. All we have is. And can't be on This America.

Speaker 1 - 00:50:15
The old idea

Speaker 7 - 00:50:17
I wanted to die.

Speaker 1 - 00:50:24
On Decolonisation. Beneath the one sky. Let this old world shatter. And is for Me a to nothing at all.

Speaker 1 - 00:50:49
But the burning present moment. We a catch the cord connecting burn and move and start again. I showed a kid how to give up everything.

Speaker 1 - 00:51:16
That was non-metaphorical decolonisation by Mount Eerie.

Speaker 5 - 00:51:22
Now back to our conversation with AJ Singh Chaudhary. I want to go back to

Robert - 00:51:28
Let's talk directly about climate change for a minute. I really appreciated this section where you went through and kind of, you know, you had a scathing critique of what we might refer to as ecomodernism related as well to what you call climate Lysenkoism.

Robert - 00:51:44
And in that section of the book, you talk about sort of the what we might call the like the techno optimist. Umbrella and what you clarify to actually be a sort of like techno mysticism, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah. It's like a faith in technology.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:52:00
It's not like the real deal. So our Patreon subscribers might recognise that I did a reading a few months back of Kai Herrin's excellent piece in verso.

Robert - 00:52:10
Titled Forget Ecomodernism. Oh, I think I'm in there. Yeah, yeah, he focussed on the same two individuals that you focus on. Matthew Huber, which has actually he has been on the show. We talked to him about the inflation Reduction Act for documentary that we did.

Robert - 00:52:27
We didn't get into the critiques and stuff that you mentioned in the book or that Kai Heron brings up in that piece, and then also. Lee Phillips is another individual and I really appreciated your sort of Lenin esque takedown. Was very entertaining passage and yeah, I'm wondering if you could maybe just outline the Ecomodernist position for us.

Robert - 00:52:48
There's so much in this chapter from, you know, like we talked about techno utopianism, nuclear carbon capture and storage, the class miss analysis, all of this is packed into the section of the text. So I'll let you kind of choose and pick which ones you want to talk about.

Robert - 00:53:05
I guess. But maybe if you could just talk a little bit about that chapter, the critiques that you have of this broadly, you know, Ecomodernist position, it's funny about this chapter some.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:53:17
Like there are some people who are like by my book only for this chapter and then I think the vast majority of people are like, why is the longest chapter on this? Like, weird s***? I've never heard of? And like, I feel both those positions and also like there was a way in which I was actually kind of hoping to avoid writing this chapter, but found it unavoidable given the amount that these kinds of positions.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:53:43
It's not just these two cats, it's other folks. Right? Like it does have a kind of like nice, attractive quality for people who haven't maybe spent as much time in the weeds of the of the natural science and engineering literatures. As I have to be.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:53:59
Like, oh, sweet. So these are some tech problems. So we can just really just focus on a bunch of politics stuff. So where I start there and I will also say that I really annoyed and this comes out, I think in the end of the book that they get to have the phrase ecomodernism, I f****** love that phrase.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:54:16
And to me, modernism isn't what it is for these guys, for these guys, modernism is like just everything we have now. But more of it. And forever and this. I also find very funny. Ideologically, because if there's one thing that is clear from both like current events and like surveys and all this kind of stuff, it's whatever people want.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:54:37
And I'm not saying that they want what I want, but whatever it is they want. It's not more of what we've got now. Like it's just not. It's just very funny to me and to me, modernism is like experimentation and I get to that later. But I do end up calling it the techno mysticism and there's sort of two different reasons why I think people are very attracted to this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:54:57
I talk in there about Jeff Bezos to like because like the most dominant form of this is found on the very wealthy, especially tech capital. So your Elon Musk's your Jeff Bezos, Bill gates, I don't know, people like that who are like this is technical stuff. And we're going to solve it with some kind of like magical space dust, or we're going to do solar geoengineering or we're going to build nukes everywhere, which, by the way.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:55:24
As I pointed out, the book. Like, has been tried China really wanted to do that. And they have way more interest in doing that than we do. And they also have the ability to build things very fast, very sophisticated, very difficult things, very fast. Because of their just the conditions. They're and spoiler alert, they were unable to and instead built out this like massive, massive network of of like ordinary renewables windmills.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:55:50
Mostly solar panels, but also windmills and a few other things. And it's also a little bit of a reaction to both the like. Tech solves everything, but also the like. We can just go back to like a non-tech world. I'm sort of trying to break that weird sort of binary and be like, well, let's see which of these technologies actually work.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:56:12
And the reason I bring, I call it climate Lysenkoism is. I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, but he was very famous for sort of being Stalin's pick for sort of what the word is, how to like, translate this into English.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:56:29
Yeah. Like sort of the grand Tsar. If you will. That's very funny. For a Soviet thing to say. But that is the terms we use for American government. You have Tsar and wiser, but whatever. The sort of science Tsar for Stalin, because his theories happened to like be politically exigent for Stalinism as opposed to them being like scientifically like justified.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:56:52
And there was a lot of pushback in the Soviet Union against Lysenko, unfortunately, you know, Stalin not known for you know, being cool with that a lot of pushback. Nonetheless, in my transposition of that concept into this, when I was looking at those two guys and it's not just them, but they are really good examples for two different varieties of this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:57:13
What you find is people sort of being like, okay. Are their technologies that would allow me to sort of go back to that, like 1955 deal, probably just in the global north. Now, I no, Matt pretends that he's like an internationalist.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:57:31
Some kind, but his book is a nationalist book. I have no idea what. He has to say about these things. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have much to say about it. These things at all. But right leaves the more or represents for me, the more like science sort of like just straight up science fantasy side.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:57:50
So he's just like none of this stuff is real planetary boundaries aren't real. Nukes. I can solve everything. There are no limits on anything, right? I make this joke, right? If you've done seven impossible things before breakfast, this is from Douglas Adams, right? You might as well go to Milliways.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:58:05
The restaurant at the end of the universe. Right? This is a little bit to on the nose, but you know, it is what it is. And in many ways it's just kind of a nice rhetorical trick. I think of it as a sort of like Suzuki and almost joke where it's like, oh, like what?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:58:21
Neoliberalism always preaches as austerity. So what I'm going to give you is abundance with no analysis of what kinds of abundance like abundance of what do these technologies work? Are they going to work on this timescale? Is this what anyone actually wants?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:58:37
Like none of that's really investigated. And in fact, as I point out, if you sort of take away the jargon like the Marxian jargon and stuff like this, there's no difference between the Geoff Bezos position and leaf beetles. They're the same person, or they represent the same positions, and it is no accident that all these people end up working for, like, similar think tanks and stuff like the breakthrough Institute and things like this, it's that's not like an accident.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:59:02
Those guys basically are an industry lobby group. And if they can staple on a couple social Democrats to make their program look a little bit more like mainstream and broad base, and it has, Bob, been great. But that's just whitewashing, right? That's not real.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:59:17
The map position, I think is interesting because his first book was really good, actually. I think I say this in a footnote. He had an earlier book in 2011 called lifeblood, and it's actually. Like it's like it's pretty solid. I mean, there's things I would critique, but it actually weirdly has a lot in common with some of my approaches.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:59:35
He talks about in that book how oil sort of helps shape a structure of feeling that has sort of is either slipping away, but is also simultaneously sticky. It's a very complex and interesting idea, and I think I wish he had pursued it instead, what he does in his book is he sort of tries to have his cake and eat it to.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 00:59:57
Constantly. So he's like, oh, the working class. Is a super broad thing. So don't worry about it. And then we'll proceed to be like, but really, it's industrial workers at the point of production and I'm like, okay, if that's really your jam, then you should be all about. Like talking about places like China, Indonesia, Vietnam, like places where people build things.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:00:16
But no, it becomes about like electrical workers in the United States, which great. And he does. He choose the left wing union? No. He doesn't. There's a there is a left wing there, smaller but electrical worker union in the United States. They're called you. They do things that Matt doesn't like.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:00:33
Like work with nonprofits that are ecological nonprofits and things like this. He likes the burly Broman vision of of what a worker is. And thus he takes both these like positions as outlined by sort of corporate unions that are working in tandem with their own industries.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:00:53
So these kind of like weird sort of sectoral, representational lobbies. And it'll be like there for a carbon capture. So we should help facilitate carbon capture. Now over here, off to the other side of the story. Anyone who is working on carbon capture, who is not working for industry, is like this s*** doesn't really work.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:01:13
And the best case scenario for it. And now I'm quoting not like sceptics. I'm quoting probably the engineer. Most associated with supporting the development and deployment of carbon capture is like, oh, it doesn't matter, right now.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:01:30
It only matters like a decade. And only matters if we've already done the low hanging fruit, which is most of the energy transition and stuff. Because as I point out in the book, a lot of these things can seem really convenient. And then you get tied up in the details and I do get tied up in the details.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:01:46
I think being honest and straightforward is very important. But at the end of the day, when people do like life cycle assessments, you've got to remember everything. We build costs something in terms of ecological costs, in terms of social costs. And right now. Something like carbon capture, which sounds so neat, right?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:02:03
Like in a, in a sort of abstract way, like, oh, I'm just going to shove like a nice little, like, I don't know, the tech equivalent of a cigarette filter on the end of my smokestack. Right. But it doesn't actually work. And actually, in the current calculus for lifecycle assessments, it costs more.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:02:19
Not just money, but like, it actually. Right? Making it, deploying it, shipping it actually costs more carbon and more stuff that goes into it. And what do we currently do? Fun fact right with most of our captured carbon, which is much lower rates than the advertised, we use it for hydraulic fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:02:42
It's a real winning, winning thing that we absolutely should do in the name of the working class. This is total bunk and the other side of the sort of this is, again, more on that sort of political versus the sort of scientific end of climate. Lysenkoism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:02:58
Is this just sort of like comically simplistic view of how classes structured in modern societies, the difference between, say, an abstract sociological theory of class and then a political class in motion?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:03:13
How is that working? Like, how can that happen? And again, all this stuff ends up reproducing this kind of techno mystical b*******. Not only about the technology, but then also about the history of class conflicts and class struggles.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:03:28
I mean, one of the funniest things to me in this whole thing is a lot of talk. These days. Stephanie Abarca is a new book out, workers of the Earth Unite and that's like a million times better of doing the story that I think someone like Hubert wants to tell. But she is not going to lie about the history.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:03:47
Nor is she going to lie and say like, oh, it's just sort of legal strikes and voting that are the toolkit to get us there. This to me, is like such nonsense and so divorced from contemporary realities.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:04:02
Like, I think everyone should be in a union. I wish that were the case. I do not think, though, that if everyone were, if everyone union that would automatically solve all of our problems. Like again, we can go back and talk about unions that you know, tack nationalists.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:04:19
And this has been the problem. Marx himself was very vexed about this. Right On the one hand, he's like, these are working class self-organisation. On the other hand, he's like, yeah, but they can get pulled into all kinds of different directions depending on the prevailing winds of the day. So again, there's this kind of like, here's my one neat trick to solve things.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:04:38
And the last thing I would just say about this stuff is it's really kind of like trying to shove a bunch of genies back into a bottle. A bunch of square pegs into round holes, and it ends up with this leaning to me very obviously, for very obvious reasons, into this kind of like, well, maybe we need to have an alliance with certain right wing tendencies.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:04:59
Maybe we need a revitalisation of nationalism in the global core. Maybe we really need these things in order to sort of buy off people. And I mean, I hate to say it and other people can refute it if they like, but some of the stuff I directly quote from these texts where they're like, workers need simple to understand messages and simple.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:05:21
This, that, and the other. And that's just not the way I think about people. I think most people are quite intelligent and sophisticated. They have different literatures, different backgrounds, different cultures, different understandings of the world. But the idea that you need to sort of trick people into your program, that's not a left wing ideal.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:05:38
And it will fail on the grounds of establishing solidarity, because people are going to be like, yo, you f****** lied to me about that. A*******. Like, we can't do exactly what the right does. And I think that's part of the story as well. I want to switch directions here for a second and talk about this project that you title.

Robert - 01:05:57
Quote the minor Paradise of the sustainable niche. Can you tell us what you mean by that? And maybe just talk about that and unpack it for us? Sure.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:06:07
I should first of all, give credit to the person who coined the phrase minor Paradise, which is my colleague at Besure, Rebecca Ariel Port and I sort of borrowed it from its unfortunately, the the work that she coined it in is not yet published. So that's one of the reasons I'm always trying to make sure she gets credit, but I sort of adapted it to this eco thing with the sustainable niche.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:06:31
And it comes at the end of the chapter. We were just talking about, and it's actually my favourite part of that chapter, because there's nothing to do with sort of trying to clear the air or wipe off the table. These sort of fantasies. Instead, the idea there is Marx and others had really good reasons for being sceptical about utopianism, although they were less sceptical of utopian socialism than they were of other forms of socialism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:06:56
And in fact the classic Marxist, Marx's own position on utopianism was like, you can't really design the future. Right? As like a blueprint that's not really possible or design even my present. Political project in all of its contours. It's going to unfold again with all these forces and changing subjectivities and whatnot.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:07:15
Right? But Marx does say utopianism often points us to places in current society where reigning ideologies reigning. Opinion, things like this clearly don't make sense. And it points our eyes and our attention to places where there are problems that we may not be aware of and so the minor Paradise section of the book, the sustainable niche, is sort of almost my boss relief, my negative space to that sort of techno mysticism space where I'm like, look, this is not utopian planning.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:07:50
I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for everyone. These things change from society to society, from, you know, it's a global problem. It can only only I can't stress this enough, work through international cooperation. And so, like the stuff that's currently happening between the US and China, for example, to me is like the worst nightmare for climate, because if there is not partnership between these two.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:08:15
Largest economic powers in the world, we're f****** toast. And I will say it's also mostly on our side. The Chinese do not want this. Socially because they're going to make a boatload of money off the other version. But nonetheless. In sort of negative relief of the sort of fake technologies I'm like, well, instead of it being like, we've got to unfetter the powers of capitalism, like Jesus Christ.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:08:39
Like, I don't know who believes that today. Already. Like a century ago, a lot of smart socialists in the global South and in the global North were like. It looks like we have technology enough to like, feed people, house people like, aren't we there yet? It seems like we're there.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:08:54
And now we're like, we've like blown right past it. Right? So a lot of these guys will say things like, let's unfetter everything. And my response is, let's see what's actually been fettered. The forces of production have not been fettered. What's been fettered?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:09:10
Are all these interesting? Like historical and contemporary either utopian ideals. Aesthetic ideals, but also technological, aesthetic, planning. All kinds of interesting ideas from across the world that were never tried, mostly because their not profitable and also because they might break open some of the geopolitical stranglehold of American imperial hegemony and to me.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:09:37
What you get there is really wild stuff. I mean, I'll just maybe 1 or 2 examples. One that's very contemporary and high tech and maybe one that's very older and low tech or what we call low tech. Right? So like one of my favourite examples and it actually took a long time because I wanted to make sure I wasn't falling for like the techno babble.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:09:57
B*******. Was the like one of the biggest hard problems to solve in the climate space is air travel. There's not really a good solution for this. Almost everything that everyone tries, fails every time you see maybe an ad that's like, oh, this is made with sustainable aviation fuel, or this has been like offset by like wheat planted 100 birch trees, like it's b*******.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:10:22
It's all lie. None of it's true. So like one of the funniest places in there is AI find in these like edits in the IPCC reports, like a couple of guys being like, can we just blimp some of this stuff? Like wouldn't that be a nice solution? And there are actually people working on this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:10:38
It gets written out, not because it's technically impossible and not even because it's like ultra anti-capitalist or something like that.

Speaker 1 - 01:10:47
It's just enough against the current model that people are like, this is unrealistic

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:10:53
Not technologically unrealistic. It's unrealistic because it will slow down those processes.

Speaker 1 - 01:11:00
Right?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:11:00
So but also when you think about the kinds of social reforms you'd have to do to have, like slower travel, whether it be and also like you can find this in the news today, like the return of sailing ships, the return of this is happening for some good reasons and for some bad reasons.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:11:18
But whatever.

Speaker 1 - 01:11:18
Right? Slowing things down.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:11:20
Hurts the bottom line and thus that makes it unrealistic as opposed to it being technologically impossible. We know how to do this stuff. Technologically, so that's one really key. Space. And also like that kind of like slow, interesting travel.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:11:36
And those kinds of objects like to me. Are this kind of stuff. You see. People get real excited about. They're like, oh my God, what would that mean if I actually had enough time?

Speaker 1 - 01:11:47
And could experience?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:11:48
Things in this way that more than like, we're going to colonise Mars seems to get people really excited and interested in sustainable solutions to real problems that also address their own unsustainable lives and I'm very clear about in the book, I don't think we're getting communism tomorrow.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:08
I wish we were frustrated.

Speaker 1 - 01:12:10
I do, but this version of sort of eco socialism or of heavily managed capitalism, I'm not saying we're going to all private property. Tomorrow either right

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:19
Just doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

Speaker 1 - 01:12:21
But it there are these paths to sort of making people's lives more enjoyable and more sustainable for themselves.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:29
Not just for the world around them.

Speaker 1 - 01:12:31
And the more low tech examples that I use their

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:34
And in the end of the book are things like evaporative cooling systems. As they were developed in Iran and in India, and in Spain and places like this or the mushroom. Beer. Right. These like beautiful windows.

Speaker 1 - 01:12:47
You have in places like San Yemen.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:50
Which were once like for aristocrats

Speaker 1 - 01:12:52
Right. But we could all have this stuff, right.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:12:54
And what do they do? Right? They are just enough. There's really beautiful, ornate windows. They let just enough air in to make those wind currents cool off the house. And just enough light in so that it's like bright and enjoyable. But it doesn't get too hot like, these are also technologies in the same way that the climate sciences have started to turn, especially in the agricultural space, to what they call indigenous knowledge, which I just call, you know.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:13:19
Accreted technological knowledge. Right? So turns out for example, that like over irrigation and petrol farming, not very sustainable. But these like practices of like terraced farming for example, in you've mentioned Palestine before. So Palestine is a great example, right. The traditional farming methods, the Olive groves, the terraced farming, etc., et cetera.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:13:38
Very sustainable. Irrigating the s*** to grow oranges in a desert. Not very sustainable. Right. So it's sort of like here's one of the places where the natural scientific literature is a little bit late to the game, and it's not something like magic. About being a brown person or black person

Speaker 1 - 01:13:55
And indigenous person, whatever.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:13:56
It's nothing magic about it. It's just like, oh, these are people who've had to live in an arid climate for a long time, or a very hot climate for a long time.

Speaker 1 - 01:14:05
And grow food

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:14:06
Let's see what they figured out to do that. And right, we have these things at our fingertips. And I cite a lot of examples in the book that show that, like when they've been tried, they've often been very successful and not only in this kind of, again, in the ecological way, but for example, uses this case study from Cuba in the period immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, where they were forced to do all this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:14:31
Ecology and agroforestry. For practical reasons and it ended up with lowering labour hours, which was the least expected outcome because everyone assumes, oh my God, if we're going back into an, we're going to have to actually bump up labour hours. But the systems were so well designed, the cooperation between the farmers and the technicians and the scientists, and so on were so integrated with knowledge going back and forth, planning, going back and forth.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:14:59
Labour going back and forth, that in fact, the projects were also socially salutary in that sense of giving people more temporal luxury, more freedom of time

Speaker 8 - 01:15:11
So as we kind of wrap up the conversation, I just have a couple more questions for you

Robert - 01:15:17
And so I'm going to start with a brief quote from the book.

Speaker 1 - 01:15:21
And then ask you sort of a follow up on that

Robert - 01:15:23
So you write in the closing pages. Quote, exhaustion may be the connective tissue between existing ecological and social upheavals across the world. Exhaustion can be the foundation for externalising. What are still to often individualised experiences of the relentlessness of the extractive circuit.

Robert - 01:15:44
For uniting and radicalising exhaustion can be more than a prism through which to view debates regarding social and ecological reproduction

Speaker 1 - 01:15:53
It can be a potent point of view and starting position for the politics of left wing climate realism

Robert - 01:16:00
So you do a great job in the book of course, and we've also spoken about this as sort of exhaustion. Like you say, being this connective tissue.

Speaker 1 - 01:16:09
Would, I think of sort of you know, is like the tissue that connects like a revolutionary class of our time.

Robert - 01:16:15
Maybe if you want to think about it, that way. I'm wondering so we've identified the political subject and you can feel free to talk about that in more. If you'd like to fill in any of the gaps that I just spoke about. But also the next question, and one of the most important ones, I think an interesting ones to me is what's your vision for a political strategy?

Robert - 01:16:34
So we have the revolutionary class. What next?

Speaker 1 - 01:16:38
So I mean, I wish we had a revolutionary class.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:16:41
So I theorise theoretically, yeah, I and like, look, I've got my Keats terminology here to. Right. I've got a bunch of terms I make a, you know, I coined for this book right, right.

Speaker 1 - 01:16:52
And realism abstractive circuit climate. Awesome. Groups and. This idea of the exhausted I don't necessarily think that like, if this political formation solidified.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:17:02
Right. Crystal, I think I used the word crystallise in the book, the necessarily means everyone chooses a Jas terms like I don't give a.

Speaker 1 - 01:17:08
F***, like if people like raise a flag and call themselves the exhausted doesn't bother me at all.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:17:13
But rather the quote you just read from me. Thanks. What that trying to point out is look, this is a common ground on which we can talk between what are often existing and quite broad based social movements.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:17:29
In the Global South and more nascent formations in the global North. This is a shared ground. This is a place to start those kinds of conversations, which can be very quid pro quo, I talked about this with that sort of like Congo example earlier, where like it sucks for I don't know.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:17:47
Apple and Samsung and Google. If Congo gets. Like more greater sovereignty and control over its resources.

Speaker 1 - 01:17:54
But it kind of might rule, right.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:17:57
In a very quick pro quo way for people who are dealing with the other side. Right. Whether it be software. Whether it be delivery, whether it be. Whatever in a, in the global North, right to have those firms be facing a lot of geopolitical headwinds like that.

Speaker 1 - 01:18:14
Right. So that kind of quid pro quo can begin with like.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:18:17
Look, we share this common ground. Right? We share these common enemies. When climate realism. Right. We share these things. And it's my view that from there you could have a greater subjectivity. Emerge. Now, the question that you asked is about strategy.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:18:34
And I have to say the strategy part of this book is quite long and is quite bleak. And in fact feels under bleak. A year later than I wrote it. Now, at this point, right. Because I had to file this, you know in 2023. It came out in 2024, and now it feels even bleaker because, yeah, I think even though I don't think we're going to have a full revolution.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:18:57
Yada yada, yada. Also, everyone should know at this point that any incrementalist program is fail and that's not actually me. AJ radical talking that is the kind of material that actually blew my mind when I first started reading Climate science papers, and they would be like, incrementalism is not working.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:19:16
And they would be very cautious and be like, we can't say what will work because that seems like that's for people who do. Politics and society and stuff like that. But I'm telling you right now, this incrementalist s*** is not working in terms of bending any of these curves or whatever.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:19:31
So the strategy that I sort of try to come up with that's in between is something I call civil war, which can sound very extreme. And I have a couple of reasons why I do this One is that in terms of looking for historical comparison, for climate mitigation and adaptation, when we're looking at the costs, right, how much wealth gets destroyed, how much wealth gets redistributed, the only thing that remotely approximates it in human history is the end of the transatlantic slave trade.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:20:02
And then the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. And anyone who's familiar with that, that is, by the way, up till now at. Least in the modern period, I don't know, in the pre-modern period. The largest destruction and transfer of wealth in human history. So we need to be thinking at that scale for climate.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:20:20
But I also want to clarify that when I say civil war, the model in fact, the quintessential example, I use and it's tough because Bolivia's now going through even more strife. Not more strife than it was then, but different kinds of strife was the sort of civil war in their own terms that Moss and it's allies had to fight against the coup government.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:20:41
And this and they were a very explicitly eco party, eco socialist sort of. And there are new style party, and that's complicated. If you're interested in that, read the book. But right. Like that did involve everything from, I think what people would think of as respectable, normal politics in our society.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:21:01
So caught cases. Running elections, disputing elections, trying to reach out to treaty organisations like all this kind of very prosaic, you know, this is normal politics strikes that to like so maybe a little bit more aggressive.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:21:16
There. But then straight up they did in fact blockade s***. Set s*** on fire and even shoot people. Not as many as there opposition did. And not in like American Civil War. God forbid. Style. Like pitch battles. They even had to like at one point. They like, released a press release being like, look, some people are almost innocent.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:21:35
People are almost certainly going to die in this process of like blockading the capital. Because, right, ambulances won't get through things like this. And in fact, the fascist coup government did try to take them to international court on that particular issue.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:21:50
And they issued apology before the fact. Right. So I think that's a very realistic understanding. This is also where one of those isomorphisms with phenol and with anti-colonial movements, I think is so powerful. But the other side of that isomorphism.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:22:06
Particularly with someone like Fanon, is it's not just about the prosaic politics. It's not just about the radical wing or the what's often called in the literature radical flank politics, which then make the like nice middle of the road radicals seem like much more attractive.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:22:22
And all of this kind of stuff, which does actually work by the way. Historically, it's also a lot of this stuff that people often think about in terms of climate, but mostly in terms of outcomes. And I rather they also thought about it as part of the movements, which is things like care, work and how to deal with the fallout of abrasive, contentious politics.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:22:45
People get hurt and traumatised. I know that's maybe now. Make me sound like a crazy person or like I'm like about to give you some weird, like, trauma. Woo woo. Lecture, but no no no no no. Just read the histories of these kinds of wars and movements and things that happen in the past.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:23:01
People get broken, people get burned out, people get PTSD. People get really difficult problems. So we also need to be thinking, and then I look at a bunch of movements and lo and behold, a lot of them do this right where they do have spaces for recuperation, where they do have spaces for treatment, for mutual aid, for sharing, and like, you know, libraries and all this kinds of stuff.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:23:25
There's all this talk right now about institutions that I can say as someone who, like, worked over a decade of my life trying to make one. Yes, like making these kinds of spaces for people is vital. And it's incredibly important. And is a significant part of every one of these radical histories.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:23:41
And so it's not just that I am trying to break, and I am trying to break a sort of false. And I show this in the notes. If anyone cares. Completely false narrative about, you know, non-violence and how it always works and yada yada yada. It's almost it's completely.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:23:57
It's basically a thesis made up in the state Department for obvious reasons. But it's not just about just proving that. It's also about getting people to think seriously. Like that should like the prosaic, the incredibly radical, including violent and also the sort of social, reproductive and care aspect of things.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:24:17
Ideally sort of disconnected from their gendering and their racialisation must be also. Part of these political movements. And they tend to be part of movements that are successful. So that's the strategy. That's part of the strategy, part.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:24:33
But it's also like with every passing moment and every passing political disaster, it just becomes more and more intense. And so like if that stuff frightens you as some of my readers, it does some of like the people who reviewed my book and really liked it were like, whoa, that's pretty far, dude.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:24:51
And like, I'm like, yeah. So if you don't want it to be even worse, we better get started right now. And I think that might actually lead into some of the temporal stuff. I know you were thinking as well

Robert - 01:25:04
Yeah. No, I agree. Also, I think that section was really interesting. I could see how it would be difficult for certain people. I think for me it wasn't very difficult. And it actually did make a lot of sense because I've been thinking a lot and we've actually had some conversations on the show about non-violence versus violence and I don't want to get too deeply into that anymore than you already did.

Robert - 01:25:27
Because, again, people can check out the book. It's a really, really interesting discussion. You can check out our episode with Brett O'Shea. Actually on Revolutionary Buddhism. If you want to see maybe some of that stuff, but yes, I think as you said, I do want to end on this question.

Robert - 01:25:47
This idea rather that you bring up at the end of the book. This idea of the long now, and it's especially interesting to me because we just did an episode really thinking about temporality on this idea of like, how to be a good ancestor and the author that we spoke to also brought up the the radical fringe theory that you just brought up.

Robert - 01:26:06
So there are some interesting overlaps. But, um, yeah. So maybe just to close out, tell us about the idea of the long now, what it means. And, and what it might look like. So like the whole book has a sort of dramaturgical shape, right?

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:26:23
It's like your initial dilemma and then your antagonist. Right? Right. And client realism. Then you're sort of stage setting, right? Is your world building is the extractive circuit. And then we have our sort of like central conflict in both chapters three and four.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:26:38
And then we get our protagonist, the exhausted and then, you know, hopefully they get, you know, what they want, right? The sustainable niche. The minor Paradise. Right The fifth chapter, I say, is the denouement. The in the prologue. Right. It's also. Like the thing I often say is it's for the theory heads is where I get most like most heavily theoretical.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:26:58
I think in the whole text and part of the argument there is something that I think applies outside of the climate frame. But then most of it is about the climate frame. So the part that's outside the climate frame is simply looking to a long tradition of thinking. I use Benjamin as my main touch point, but there are many other figures.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:27:15
I also. Look at who have always been suspicious of this idea that we only have past and futures. Right and right. We're always thinking about the future and this is particularly the case in climate stuff, right? Oh my god.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:27:31
Won't we think of what's going to happen to our children? Well, I hate to break it to people, but there are brushfires in New York City. Right now. Prospect Park, right, Prospect Park and then Upper Manhattan yesterday. It's you saw that on the news. The news, the new normal. Not so great. I mean, and that's minor.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:27:48
The stuff happening here is minor. What just happened with to superstorm hurricanes in a row like this stuff is not going away. And now I'm just talking about stuff that's hitting the US, let alone s*** that's happening elsewhere. I mean, there are whole countries who are already planning their own demise.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:28:04
Many of these smaller island states in the Pacific are like, okay, that's it. Games over there, bargaining chip. Now is not like for climate investment. It's like, who's going to take our population in, right? Like some of that stuff is like really, really intense.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:28:20
So we are talking about the present. I'll say what I say to my students, actually, as opposed to thinking about the book, listen to any political speech ever, and you'll always get some version of left or right Hegelianism you'll get like, yeah. Where people again will have this fetish of the child or the grandchildren or something like that.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:28:40
And we're going to do X, Y, and Z to save them. So a right wing version of this would maybe be right, but it's still like a weird it has a weird like progress regress thing. There are. Inverse might be like and thus we will defend the traditional family and make sure that the world, the future is safe for these.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:28:58
These precious precious not yet existing children. I'm very much more interested in the actual existing people than in theoretical people who don't yet exist. But whatever. And then the left wing version. I'm sorry to say, the best statement of this is Martin Luther King, who I otherwise really respect and is a great guy.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:29:16
But like the arc of history is long and bends toward justice, which then of course, Obama borrowed for his campaign's no no, that's just Christian Providentialism. I'm sorry, that's just theology. It doesn't actually have any meaning in the real world.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:29:31
Whatever justice one gets is what you can reach out of conditions. And so especially in the climate, space, there is often a consensus or just an assumption that we are talking about a future oriented problem and that there's too much quote unquote, like short term thinking as opposed to long term thinking.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:29:51
And that's without even getting into like long termism and effective altruism. And these new cults of the right that are just bizarre. As opposed to just dealing with the fact that climate is a present tense. Problem. Climate mitigation, adaptation, the political problems are a present tense problem and the possibilities for these quasi utopian respites.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:30:15
I call them lateral steps, which is I borrowed that phrase from Lauren Berlant, the late Lauren Berlant. Right. This of lateral project is much more exciting and also is what we need to be thinking about. It's funny because we just again, I hate to use selection examples, but we just had this big election in the US.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:30:32
Obviously, and thus you already have people talking about like primaries and elections in 28 and 32. And as someone who's like climate pilled, I guess I don't know if that's a term. Maybe I just made it up like it's real hard for me to think about, like what the electoral landscape looks like.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:30:50
Towards the end of the 2020s or the beginning of the 2030s, where it would not be a radical proposition for example, to say like large swaths of like very important parts of the United States, say, Florida, California, etc.. And stuff like this.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:31:06
Have been rendered partially or totally f*****, right where huge portions of the population have. Unlike this, is where the rubber hits the road on how climate change changes politics, which again, is one of the issues that I set out to write about.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:31:22
And I guess the last thing to say there is this also ties into that sort of minor Paradise issues that like, if we stop just trying to like invent, you mentioned before Fisher. Right. And I love Fisher.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:31:37
And like the privatisation of stress. And when I talk about these kinds of externalising exhaustion, I'm thinking both with Fanon but also with Fisher, right. This like how like these kinds of stress and stressors, whether we're talking about them and here is my adaptation, right.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:31:53
In psychological or ecological terms, can be externalised as opposed to like, oh, it's my fault. Similarly, when we look at the present as the long now, not just the split second moment, that we're in, but basically this rough time period of mitigation and adaptation, not exactly, but roughly.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary - 01:32:13
Right. We can see different and more exciting political projects then what are maybe our fantasies of what exciting political projects are You've been listening to an upstream conversation with AJ Singh Chaudhary.

Speaker 5 - 01:32:34
Executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and core faculty member specialising in social and political theory and author of the Exhausted of the Earth. Politics in a Burning World, published by Repeater Books.

Speaker 5 - 01:32:51
Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Mount Eerie for the intermission. Music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded, we couldn't keep this project going without your support.

Speaker 5 - 01:33:10
There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes at least one a month, but usually more at Patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast.

Speaker 5 - 01:33:26
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Speaker 5 - 01:33:43
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Speaker 5 - 01:33:59
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Speaker 5 - 01:34:23
Thank you.


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