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00:00:30.000Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:00:36.460We've been denied the right and the capacity to imagine what the world might be like after capitalism.
00:00:41.580That's why most of us can rather imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism.
00:00:51.700Today we are speaking with Raj Patel. Raj is an award-winning writer, activist, and academic.
00:00:57.740He is a research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities in the University currently known as Rhodes University in South Africa.
00:01:13.400He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cornell University.
00:01:19.100He's worked for the World Bank and WTO and protested against them around the world.
00:01:24.720Raj co-taught the 2014 Edible Education Class at UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan.
00:01:30.660In 2016, he is recognized with the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award.
00:01:35.600He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the U.S. Housing Financial
00:01:40.180Service Committee and was an advisor to Oliver DeShutter, the United Nations special reporter
00:01:53.920So I was just reading your most recent book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and I was so blown away and really recommend the audience to picking this up and diving into it.
00:02:05.380And in there, you describe how cheapness is not synonymous with low cost, but that, quote, cheap is a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work, human and animal, botanical and geological, with as little compensation as possible, end quote.
00:02:23.920So, would you mind elaborating on this definition of cheapness and also describe how the advent of cheapness is connected to the transition away from a way of collective existence in which the connections between all life forms and the nourishment they provide is appreciated towards one in which everything is viewed as now stuff and commodities and nothing is sacred?
00:02:47.320Well, Anna, you've put your finger on the sort of central story that we wanted to tell when writing this history of the world in Seven Cheap Things.
00:02:55.840Because, look, every human civilization has appropriated and used the natural world in a certain way.
00:03:04.620And, you know, there's a long and storied history about some of the civilizations that have run out of steam because they exhausted the sort of ecological foundations on which they depended.
00:03:16.400But I think what's important about understanding our current era and understanding the era in which we live as the capitalocene, this era of capitalism, is that there's something very distinctive about the way that capitalism comes to view nature.
00:03:31.620Because, as I say, I mean, every sort of human society has a word for itself, you know, whether it's the chosen people or, you know, the people of the Middle Kingdom or whatever it is.
00:03:40.860But in capitalism, there's a very strange idea of society and its opposite.
00:03:48.040The opposite of society in modern capitalism is nature.
00:03:52.700Now, this idea that on the one hand is certain kinds of humans and on the other hand is all this other stuff that we can use and we can put to work, that's a very novel idea.
00:04:03.280So while civilizations have been messing around with ecosystems for a while, only humans under capitalism have this particular view.
00:04:12.460And the trouble with that is that by abstracting certain kinds of humans into society and leaving the rest of humans, usually that's women and people of color, in this sort of natural category, you end up with the possibility of precisely observing that anything that isn't part of society is fair game to be turned into a commodity and to be bought and sold and to be manipulated and used in various ways.
00:04:38.240And that history, you know, we trace really from the sort of 1400s, but it's something that the consequences of which we live with today.0.89
00:04:48.080And part of the story here, again, is that to make things cheap begins with making nature cheap.
00:04:55.060So in order to be able to generate profits, you know, in the book, we talk about the sort of uber capitalists of Columbus.
00:05:02.780Columbus comes to the new world as this adventurer on the frontier, and his job is precisely to be able to return riches to his investors and to make a great deal of money for himself and his patrons, himself mainly.
00:05:20.480But in order to do that, he has to come to the new world and exploit its human and extra human resources to the best of his ability.
00:05:31.660And, in fact, there's this sort of strange line in his diaries where he mourns the fact that there are all kinds of amazing animals and plants in the new world.
00:05:41.180And the reason that he is rendered sad is because he doesn't know how much they're worth.
00:05:46.040And that idea of cheapening nature is one that begins a long process of then starting to cheapen other things.
00:05:54.500And we'll get into discussing those other cheap things as well.
00:05:57.200But it begins with the idea of alienating humans and certain kinds of humans in society on the one hand and using as the opposite of society nature on the other.
00:06:05.880And through that distinction, you create both a strange sort of walled garden of humanity on the one hand and a strange walled garden of everything else on the planet and every other kind of thing in the web of life on the other hand.
00:06:17.440It's amazing to hear about Columbus's diary entry and how disturbing that is. And, you know, the historical narrative of the rise of capitalism is just extremely layered. And I actually still struggle to grasp an accurate understanding of what cultural happenings fueled its birth.
00:06:39.760you know, if that understanding is even wholly possible. One of my friends and a huge inspiration
00:06:46.000of mine is Lila June. And, you know, she speaks about how capitalism arose as an outgrowth of the
00:06:52.180trauma and this madness wrought by the witch hunts of Europe and the genocide of European women.
00:06:57.980And then there also exists a breadth of literature tying the origins of capitalism to the Neolithic
00:07:03.240revolution. You know, the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agricultural settlements and the
00:07:08.780privatization of land and the accumulation and guarding of excess food. So I'm wondering,
00:07:14.460what is your best understanding of when, how and why capitalism emerged?
00:07:20.260I mean, we see it emerging really at the end of feudalism. So you need to understand that
00:07:25.700at the end of feudalism is a very turbulent time, particularly in European history, because
00:07:31.460Europe has, and feudalism itself has been able to flourish through a particularly propitious and
00:07:38.020gentle era of good weather called the medieval warm period, when climate was particularly
00:07:45.040favorable to people who owned land. But merely owning land doesn't necessarily make you a
00:07:50.940capitalist. It just means that certainly under feudalism, there are certain kinds of rights and
00:07:56.200responsibilities that feudal lords have to their peasants, and peasants' labor is extracted. But
00:08:02.440And, you know, in bad times, it's definitely the Lord's responsibility to take care of the peasantry.
00:08:10.660Now, this isn't to argue for a return to feudalism, but it's just to observe that there was a sort of moral economy of feudalism.
00:08:16.620But after you have the end of the medieval war period, so you have this climate catastrophe and you have the Black Death.
00:08:24.040So you have this horrific period in which a third of the European population is killed by the bubonic plague.
00:08:31.440You start having peasant rebellions where peasants who had been exploited by the lords were sick of it.
00:08:37.880And they said, well, we don't like this system and we want to do something else.
00:08:42.160Some peasants had ideas about being autonomous and being able to grow their own things on their own land.
00:08:48.180And data suggests that had they been allowed to do that, they would have been much, much better off.
00:08:53.960They'd have been able to increase food output by double and if not three times as much in some estimates suggest.
00:09:00.500But instead, we trace the origin of capitalism not to some devious plot, but it's just something that worked for the lords who couldn't reimpose serfdom and instead start embarking on colonial adventures, colonial adventures that are an outcropping of things like the Crusades.
00:09:20.860But you're right that witchcraft and the burning of witches has a lot to do with this, because we see in every moment of capitalist history that when there are particularly women who are standing up for justice and for equality and for the against the expropriation of land on which they find themselves, then those women are targeted as witches.
00:09:42.100And you see that in the early modern era at the end of feudalism, at the beginning of capitalism.
00:09:48.380You see it in the witch trials here in the United States.
00:09:51.260And you still see it in parts of Africa where land grabs are happening and where women who find themselves and their communities on top of mineral wealth all of a sudden become persecuted as a result of their defense of the commons and of their way of life.
00:10:06.840And if people want to learn more about that, the amazing political economist Silvia Federici
00:10:11.760has terrific work on the modern witch burnings that comes out of her work called Caliban and
00:10:17.880the Witch. Earlier, you mentioned this idea of how capitalism has othered the vast majority of
00:10:24.800humanity, which could be women, people of color, indigenous peoples, you know, those who don't
00:10:30.500conformed to the gender binary etc so in a way that their subjugation and exploitation
00:10:37.300into cheapness is actually justified within this system and how this justification is related to0.67
00:10:44.220being associated with nature which is viewed as separate from civilized society which is what you
00:10:49.400were talking about so was that brought up in this feudal time or did that go hand in hand it sort of
00:10:56.460gets underway in particular under colonialism because but one of the first colonial adventures
00:11:01.380is the british in ireland um and they see themselves uh as bringing civilization to
00:11:10.520people who are beyond the pale i mean if you've heard of the term beyond the pale you may think0.55
00:11:15.300well it's it's for something to be beyond the pale is for it to be ridiculous or crazy but
00:11:19.940initially, the idea of the pale itself was a border between the civilized English colony
00:11:27.280in Ireland and the savage Irish. And the Irish were called savages. And this language of savagery0.99
00:11:34.080and wildness is very weird. It emerges, and it becomes a bad word to be savage and wild,
00:11:41.740precisely at the moment that it becomes a good thing to be part of society.0.99
00:11:45.100And so to have the Irish on the other side of the pale and to have them be deemed uncivilized opens the door to expropriating them in the name of bringing civilization to the benighted.0.99
00:11:59.420And that's along similar lines to the kinds of logic that the Spanish were using in the New World, where they said, look, we're here to bring Christianity to you, and if you do not recognize the King of Spain and the Lord Jesus Christ, then we will recognize you as infidels or apostates, and we will enslave you for your own good for the next two generations.
00:12:21.380And of course, this declaration was read out in Spanish, and people didn't take well to that in First Nations here in the New World. But again, it's precisely because they were deemed to be lacking in civilization, that then they were subjugated and enslaved.
00:12:38.420And, you know, that logic was put into practice, certainly with a vigor in the new world. But the subjugation of the Irish, of course, is still a long and dark and under-researched and unacknowledged history of English colonialism.
00:12:52.680You know, there's another thought I was having of the seven categories detailed in a history of the world in seven cheap things. I felt that cheap care and cheap labor are among the most underrepresented within the dialogue of the Anthropocene and climate change.
00:13:10.880And I really want to take a moment and make space to acknowledge the human hands and hearts that are still enslaved and exploited in order to sustain all the moving pieces of the capitalist machine, the accumulation of wealth and the cheapness of it all.
00:13:26.960In your book, you note that, quote, there are more humans in forced labor in the 21st century than there were transported by the Atlantic slave trade with nearly 21 million people in forced labor in 2012.
00:13:40.040end quote. 2.2 million in labor forced upon them by the state in prison work or rebel military
00:13:46.920groups. There's 4.5 million in commercial sexual exploitation and 14.2 in forced economic
00:13:54.000exploitation, end quote. Yet modern slavery, it still remains out of sight and out of mind
00:14:01.560to the majority of Westerners or the privileged class. And even though it's at the root of nearly
00:14:08.820all of the commercial products and substances and goods and much of the food we eat. So I'm
00:14:14.480wondering if you could shed light on the scope of slave labor in existence today, including that
00:14:19.560which is found here in North America, for example, through the prison industrial complex and migrant
00:14:25.060labor. Well, yeah, alas, the story is worse than we wrote about in the book. Just as the book came
00:14:33.380out, the International Labour Organization released new data on the state of modern slavery.
00:14:39.520And the data is now that there are 40 million people, 25 million in forced labour and 15 million
00:14:44.480in forced marriage. And I'm so glad that you took a moment to recognise that work and care,
00:14:50.900you know, labour and care certainly are two sides of the same coin, that you can't have
00:14:55.780work without people to manage and to bring up and to maintain and to care for broken bodies,
00:15:02.040broken through paid or underpaid work. And the trouble is that, you know, we may think, for
00:15:07.960example, of our cell phones and say, well, you know, the coders who were paid this were paid
00:15:13.320very well. And some coders will say, well, not well enough. And, you know, we're exploiting
00:15:16.720ourselves and working every hour, God sends. And, you know, we're doing it just to be able to stay
00:15:20.700on the treadmill of surviving in the Bay Area or wherever it is. And beneath their exploitation
00:15:26.160is the exploitation of, say, the workers who clean up after them, the janitors, the care workers,
00:15:31.660the domestic workers and beneath them you know if you look at your cell phone and you look look at
00:15:37.020the the um desperately underpaid workers who assemble these these things um in china and0.74
00:15:43.000taiwan um and then in order to have the minerals that go into your cell phone uh there is exploitation
00:15:50.820happening and in some cases modern day slavery in places like the democratic republic of congo
00:15:55.400where modern slavery exists in the mining of rare earth metals. And so the cell phone in your
00:16:03.380pocket is the complex kind of layer cake of different kinds of exploitation, all of which
00:16:09.460is underwritten by the need for free and cheap care and free and cheap minerals and free and
00:16:16.640cheap energy, free and cheap food for the workers all the way along that labor chain. And so that
00:16:23.960story is one that's that's already very close to us it's right you know it's right here in our
00:16:28.420hands in our pockets um but in the united states you know our food comes from um as you say sort
00:16:35.320of the prison industrial complex we have you know i've been writing recently about chicken
00:16:39.880and in the u.s chicken industry there are workers who are prison inmates who are paid 25 cents an
00:16:46.860hour in some drug rehabilitation centers again people in these centers are sent to work at
00:16:52.500chicken factories as part of their therapy, and they're paid nothing at all. And on top of that,
00:16:57.500there is the huge amount of domestic work that's unrecognized. The Atlantic magazine
00:17:02.540ran a recent piece called Our Slave that was about domestic workers right here in the United
00:17:08.780States, usually women, usually immigrants, who are in no position to be able to demand
00:17:14.000redress or justice for the kinds of work that they are exploited in order to be able to provide.
00:20:38.200And I'm wondering if you could describe how the end of cheap food, especially with climate change ravaging many agricultural lands, will inevitably trigger the end of cheap work.
00:20:50.460So one of the things you need if wages are low and if care is unpaid and dependent, you need cheap care in order to keep your economy humming along, is cheap food.
00:21:04.680So things like the dollar burger and food that you can get at a dollar general.
00:21:10.500And that's a sort of complex, not just of making sure that there's subsidy for the producers, but there's subsidy for consumers as well for things like SNAP and welfare programs that make sure that Americans don't go hungry.
00:21:25.100And, of course, those welfare programs are woefully inadequate.
00:21:27.700We still live in a United States where nearly 50 million people are food insecure.
00:21:31.640Now, the trouble is that cheap food can't last forever because you're always squeezing out the sort of environmental and social costs associated with that cheap food.
00:21:42.920Now, one of the responses of the of industrial agriculture is just to exploit workers more and to exploit the environment more and to exploit nature more.
00:21:51.960But that can't last forever either. And one of the long term consequences is precisely climate change.
00:21:57.380And the long term effects of climate change are precisely to make food more expensive, because all the models show that with a warmer planet, most grain yields will go down.
00:22:08.940You know, the grain that we've grown up with and humanity has grown up with emerged through a relatively stable period of existence called the Holocene.
00:22:18.060And that period is coming to an end with that period at an end.
00:22:22.340Now, the question is, well, what comes next? And whatever comes next, it's going to disrupt rather profoundly the, you know, the sort of devil's bargain that comes with having cheap food as a supplement to cheap labor and low wages and cheap energy as well.
00:22:38.280And I want to acknowledge the nuancing of modern slavery that occurs through greenwash consumerism. You go into any organic co-op or grocery store and you'll see the shelves overflowing with a fossil fuel derived plastic packaging containing exotic foods, whether it's coconut oil or goji berries, coffee, yerba mate, chocolate.
00:23:00.740it. And these are all coming from far reaches of the globe, marketed with pleasing pictures of
00:23:06.360birds and flowers and happy people. And I feel like this is often invoking this false sense of
00:23:13.640ethics and environmental consciousness. So I wonder about fair trade. And are the wages provided
00:23:21.020truly compatible with what we reap in Western society? And what chasm is being left in
00:23:27.680communities that export all that they nurture. You know, is fair trade nothing more than a
00:23:33.100fictitious green mask over the same tireless exploitation of land, water, air, animal and
00:23:39.880human? For me, I mean, I buy fair trade coffee because the alternative is horrible, right? I
00:23:47.180mean, what do you want? Bastard coffee, coffee that involves the exploitation of children because0.98
00:23:51.120you want your coffee to taste that much more bitter? No, of course, you buy fair trade, but
00:23:56.280So fair trade can be an amnesiac. I mean, fair trade allows farmers who are hanging on by their fingernails to hang on just a little bit longer. It doesn't necessarily speak to how well workers are treated. It doesn't necessarily speak to the dreams and desires of people who aren't farmers.
00:24:13.360And what are we to do with people who want things like land reform, who aren't in the position of being farmers?
00:24:19.140How does our fair trade, you know, extra penny a pound really open up the possibilities for people who aren't even in receipt of that generosity that we have decided to engage in?
00:24:30.760So for me, I think the important thing is to recognize, first of all, that there are people who do want fair trade to continue, who are in a position of needing that money in some cases to be able to be able to keep the wolf from the door.
00:24:42.600And so I would buy fair trade rather than not. But I think it's also important to ask the question, well, why is it that, say, when it comes to bananas, that the Caribbean is our fruit basket here in the United States?
00:24:54.160The country that's most likely to be sending bananas to the U.S. is Guatemala. And the reason that it grows bananas is because the United Fruit Company set up an enterprise there and took over a vast amount of the most productive land.
00:25:09.620When a democratically elected head of state said, well, we'd like to take some of your unused land and redistribute it, the United Fruit Company was so appalled that they called John Foster Dulles at the CIA, and one thing led to another, and that instigated a coup that cost the lives of a quarter of a million people.
00:25:30.500And there's no fair trade that makes any kind of restitution for that. And if we think that fair trade is in some way touching that history, we're sorely mistaken. But we never think that because we think that fair trade is precisely that the sort of purchase that confers so much virtue that we can forget everything else.
00:25:50.540And that's one of the dangers of green consumerism is that it's precisely a way of lulling our conscience and our investigative faculties and our curiosity so that all we have to do and all we have to be curious about is what kind of label is on the side of this kind of package.
00:26:05.020And then once we see the kinds of labels that check off the boxes of our curiosity, then we give up on being curious about our food and about how it gets to us and what the history is behind it.
00:26:14.500And that's one of the problems with the food movement, I think, is that there's a lack of historical curiosity and awareness so that we find that it's, as you say, these emporia of feel-goodery in the Bay Area or anywhere else.
00:26:28.920I mean, here I am in Austin, the headquarters of Whole Foods, Amazon Whole Foods now.
00:26:33.360And there's not an aisle that I can go down and shop for land reform or for restitution for colonialism because that's not on the menu.
00:26:41.540I think that's what it is that we need to be aware of when, as I say, I mean, this is not to smack down fair trade, but it is to say if you think that fair trade is the best that we can do, you're sorely mistaken.
00:26:54.860It's the very minimum that needs to happen.
00:26:57.780But in some cases, it might even be counterproductive.
00:27:00.480But we need to be thinking much more about, well, what is it that people who aren't benefiting from our largesse when we buy fair trade, what do they want in Guatemala, for example?
00:27:10.080What about land reform? What about the other things? What about the choice of people in the Caribbean not to be America's fruit basket, but to be something else? Those possibilities are only thinkable after we have recognized the demands for land reform that are coming from the Caribbean, but also when we recognize how it is that we sit on top of centuries of exploitation and we reap the rewards of that unconsciously and without demand.
00:27:35.660You know, we never asked to be born into a society in which colonialism had brought us these goodies. But now that we know that we do live in that society, we have to take a relationship to that knowledge. And I don't think enough of us do.
00:27:49.300What would it look like to take a relationship to that knowledge? What could we do in this country, in the United States, that goes beyond just buying fair trade?
00:27:57.940You know, recognizing and acknowledging things like reparations for slavery, for instance, reparations for colonialism, reparations for climate debt. These aren't ideas that I'm pulling out of my hat. They're ideas that organizations and movements have long mobilized around. And they are live issues.
00:28:18.480You know, one just has to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' arguments around restitution of reparations for slavery.
00:28:24.880I think that they're tremendously germane and incredibly contemporary.
00:28:30.140So that's one of the things that we can do since the U.S. food system was built through slavery.
00:28:35.280If one wants to know what one can do, one can partner with and support organizations that are demanding reparations for slavery.
00:28:41.800But, you know, I think that when you look at organizations like the Movement for Black Lives, those demands are very clear.
00:28:48.040So it's not like one has to go terribly far. Wherever you meet organizers from the Movement for Black Lives, you'll find these demands. Yes, those aren't initially the demands that one hears because the demands that one hears are about survival. But if you look at the policy documents that the Movement for Black Lives has generated, reparations is in there. And it's important to recognize and own that.
00:29:07.840You brought up such an important point with land reparations. And I was speaking with Clayton Thomas Mueller a couple weeks ago, and we were speaking about if you care about social justice and climate justice and environmental justice, but you're not talking about the privatization of land and trying to find a way to give land back to its original inhabitants or people.
00:29:37.840who don't have access to land, then we're not really dealing with the bigger issue. And we're
00:29:41.880not really going to change the underlying chasm of this culture that we're living in. So I think
00:29:48.820it's such an important point to bring up. And also to consider, it just seems that no matter
00:29:55.600where you look on the spectrum of positionalities in our current societal framework, that we are
00:30:02.480vastly devoid of fulfillment. You know, on one hand, those at the top, the seriously privileged
00:30:09.900are so disconnected from that which they consume or that gives them life that they are left empty,
00:30:16.080chasing these unattainable desires, always yearning for more and more stuff to fill the
00:30:22.560void left where connection and community once flourished. And then on the other hand, labors
00:30:29.560of love dissolve into this grudging feudal work when the care, effort, and skill given does not
00:30:37.220serve the community, self, or ecosystem the giving is stemming from. So those labors of those
00:30:43.080fettered at the lower end of the capitalist hierarchy are robbed of meaning when they
00:30:48.480serve as only an oppressive and detached entity. So it's this puzzle to try to put our minds to,
00:30:57.540And I am just thinking about how does cheapness deny collective fulfillment in our work?
00:31:05.400Well, I think you put your finger on it. I mean, just to go back to the point about land reform, you know, one of the arguments against land reform is, look, imagine we had land reform in America.
00:31:16.840The day after tomorrow, a few people would still own a lot of land because some people would have just sold it because they're in debt and other people would have accumulated because they had a ton of cash to begin with.
00:31:28.420And so what looks like a redistribution of resources to everyone quickly replicates and reproduces this idea of private property and inequality.
00:31:38.980What are you going to do about that? And the answer has to be that part of any serious understanding of land redistribution also has to be an understanding of the end of market rule on land.
00:31:52.700Because one of the things we trace in History of the World and Seven Chief Things is how gender inequality, for example, emerges at the same time as the enclosure of land in Britain, for instance, or in England, and how histories of using a plow and of monoculture and of gendered divisions of labor can be traced to precisely the taking away of the commons of land that is governed by everyone for everyone.
00:32:21.700And so while in the US, we're used to hearing about the tragedy of the commons. In fact, in many cultures, the commons is not only alive and well and demonstrably doing better than private property or public property.
00:32:36.340But it's from the enclosure, the end, the killing of the commons that the biggest tragedies have arisen because Britain and England at the time of the rise of capitalism had great ways of managing these lands together collectively.
00:32:53.540And that collective commoning, the managing of the commons together was ended by the rise of capitalism and the rise of private property.
00:33:01.680So if we're interested in land reform and we're interested in not being alienated from one another, we do have to give up on this idea of everyone owns land in the way that we own it today.
00:33:11.860We can have security of tenure without owning land, and we can have security of community without a great deal of money.
00:33:19.320And those are the kinds of visions we need to develop once more.
00:33:22.780But that's the question, isn't it? How do we pluck from ourselves this profound individualism that's been foisted on us by capitalism's culture? And for that, we have to look beyond the boundaries of capitalism.
00:33:35.560This isn't to say that collective well-being and cooperation aren't possible within capitalism. They are. But if we're interested, we do need to think about how have other civilizations managed to rebroker a relationship with other things in the web of life that aren't about this binarism of nature and society.
00:33:54.500But how do we refoster an ecological connection to one another and to other living things that is about a sort of a collective and mutual understanding of our own place in the grand scheme of the web of life and without exploiting the web of life, but understanding how it is that we're part of a much bigger system of exchanges?
00:34:15.720And that sort of cultural shift isn't, I don't think, to be found within capitalism.
00:34:24.500You can't watch it on YouTube. You can't retweet it. This is the sort of thing that the only one gets through collective interaction and through social movement organizing.
00:34:35.300And that's why, you know, Jason W. Moore and I, my co-author in The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, we're very enthused by and inspired by the kinds of language and thinking that comes from non-capitalist civilizations, of which there are still many, even here in the United States.
00:34:50.900When people say one nation under God, that's not even remotely true. This is a country with 500 nations and those nations are still alive and they're still able to teach the dominant capitalist civilization such as it is a thing or two about how it is that one might relate to and embrace our position in the web of life.
00:36:35.180when you were speaking about this individualism and you know so much of this country was built on
00:36:45.420this rugged individualist manifest destiny philosophy and i think about why that is the
00:36:54.380case today why that it has still continued and the first thing that came to my mind was
00:36:59.420this deep mistrust that humans have amongst each other and the wounding that has come
00:37:06.280from capitalism and stealing land and pillaging villages and raping women and how there's this
00:37:14.880inherent fear and mistrust of one another. And perhaps that is what fuels this individual
00:37:22.620separation that we're facing and what else could there be that is continuing this
00:37:30.100separation you know other than selfishness or maybe even this desire for survival and
00:37:37.480because we've been conditioned to perhaps believe that this is the way to survive is by
00:37:42.220separating ourselves from not only nature but from one another and to not share
00:37:47.080this kind of scarcity mentality. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Where does this
00:37:53.060individualism stem from? And why does it continue now?
00:37:58.560It's not clear to me that everyone is distrustful of one another, and that we are therefore
00:38:05.320destined to be trapped in cycles of misery and unhappiness. And the reason I think that is,
00:38:14.020think of the various kinds of reciprocity games and data that we have from behavioral economics.
00:38:21.720And in behavioral economics, we have ways of thinking about how humans interact with and
00:38:27.900trust one another. And the data seems to suggest that, you know, by and large,
00:38:32.940humans are pretty good at recognizing one another and trusting one another. And it takes work to
00:38:39.380make that go away. And so the least trusting people and the most selfish people in modern
00:38:47.180society today are graduate students in economics, because that's what it is that they're being
00:38:53.340taught. But I think that that's precisely the point, that there's a lot of this that is teachable.
00:38:59.840And if it can be taught for the bad, it can certainly be taught for the good.
00:39:02.660you know, that while our politicians are offering nothing but fear, there are movements that are
00:39:12.040offering actually a great deal of kindness and trust and hope in a way that's not just sort of
00:39:19.080the sort of specious bumper sticker kind that we saw from the Obama administration. But also
00:39:26.520So the real thing, a reasonable and well thought out plan for change that is about recognizing the power that each of us has, but also that it's about recognizing the movement work that needs to happen ahead.
00:39:43.800But that doesn't pander to the idea that we're all different and that the only way we survive is individually, but rather goes almost exactly in the opposite direction by recognizing that the only way we survive is collectively and together.
00:39:56.780that kind of you know that kind of movement organizing is around um and part of the reason
00:40:03.160i think it's so hard to see is because it has been hidden it is a threat and it is you know
00:40:07.280the organizing of everything from the union movement in the united states to first nations
00:40:13.160to people of color gets vilified uh you know just look at you know the kinds of things that that
00:40:18.440black lives matter has to put up with to give you just a sense of the the struggles that some of
00:40:24.340these movements are up against. But, you know, you see it around the world. Environmentalists
00:40:28.620are being killed left, right and center because what they're offering is precisely a threat to
00:40:33.280the existing way of doing business and to the existing order. Because what environmentalists
00:40:39.780offer at or how ecologists offer at their very best is not just a way of understanding the
00:40:47.320environment as something we live in, but something that is when we reconnect to it after capitalism,
00:40:54.340becomes a profound challenge to the common way of doing business. And that those threats, I think,
00:41:00.100you know, make it hard for people to imagine for most of us to imagine ourselves doing anything
00:41:04.520other than shopping green. But that's also because we've been denied the right and the capacity to
00:41:10.300imagine what the world might be like after capitalism. That's why most of us can rather
00:41:14.660imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism. And that's why we wrote this book
00:41:19.000is to put tools in folks' hands so that it might be possible to imagine and to play with the ideas
00:41:26.240of, well, given that capitalism is heading for a very profound crisis, what would we like to
00:41:32.180happen next? And the kinds of thoughts we're encouraging people to entertain are cosmological
00:41:38.560ones, right? This isn't sort of small-time thinking. This isn't about, well, I think we
00:41:43.960should all drive Priuses. This is about reimagining what it would be to be a human in this time.
00:41:49.660What is it to regain some element of ourselves through reengagement with the natural world?
00:41:56.640And that's not a small ask by any means. But that's what we're saying. Well, yeah, that's
00:42:02.080right. It's not a small ask, because if you're imagining the end of capitalism, you have to
00:42:05.900think cosmologically large thoughts. And I think for many of us, that's kind of scary to think
00:42:11.860thoughts that big. But it's important that we do because as capitalism and its crises become far,
00:42:20.020far worse, if we haven't thought these big thoughts, we're going to find ourselves adrift
00:42:24.000and panicked and even more scared than we are now. I couldn't agree more that we need to
00:42:29.940push past our fear to think these thoughts, to be curious and ask these questions. And I think
00:42:36.500that is the most powerful place to start is just questioning what does it mean to be a human?
00:42:41.860in this time, in this destructive capitalist resource extractive world in the Anthropocene
00:42:51.020during climate change. And I can't help but question how we came to as a culture to uphold
00:42:58.640the value of money as it relates to time as the ultimate above all else. And it was really
00:43:05.320fascinated to read about how the emergence of the clock was essential when we began to place
00:43:11.560monetary value upon our labors. And I've been thinking a great deal lately about how money
00:43:18.520binds us to this linearity and a narrow perception of time, you know, robbing us of a true
00:43:26.020appreciation for the value in our work and life itself. You know, we can't ever be really fully
00:43:33.200present if we're always counting minutes and dollars and we're constantly stuck in the past
00:43:39.640or the future without a genuine appreciation for either. So this is kind of two thoughts,
00:43:46.700but one is I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on how we can begin to revalue our lives and work
00:43:53.340so that we can once again live in recognition of deep evolutionary time and our connection
00:44:01.400to the greater ecological web, and then how deep time also fits into comforting us when we are
00:44:09.740thinking about these big questions. Well, I mean, I think that that's the right question.
00:44:15.840One of the examples I like is from the First Nations that come from what is today the Pacific
00:44:22.340Northwest border of Canada and the United States. You know, I think what they suggest is that if we
00:44:28.620are to have these transformations, they can't be individual. You can't just go out and hug a tree
00:44:32.700and imagine that you've ended capitalism or that you've embraced deep time. That's not going to
00:44:38.080work. You can't just stick a zero in front of your years. And so we're recording this not in
00:44:45.8802017, but 02017. And that kind of individual trickery doesn't work because the kinds of
00:44:54.340transformations we need are going to be collective they're going to be you know to reconstitute
00:44:58.400ourselves as humans and as people and one of the examples that i like uh from the coastal salish
00:45:04.120people is the salmon festival they celebrate the first salmon that comes up you know in september
00:45:09.960and october uh the first coho for example will come up and then for 10 days no one's allowed to
00:45:15.120fish because everyone is celebrating the arrival of the salmon and you celebrate not just the
00:45:20.220arrival of the salmon but the treaty between your people and the salmon people now you might say
00:45:24.760well the salmon didn't do much um treating there but it's what was important to recognize here is
00:45:29.920uh that there's a much longer rhythm of birth and death and rebirth that the treaty recognizes and
00:45:38.460it also doesn't say the salmon is ours because it's salmon and it's hunting season and so we
00:45:44.200can get it. It's much more a story about how we, as a people, constitute ourselves and become
00:45:51.100peers with the salmon. And the only thing that peers can do is have treaties with one another.
00:45:55.620That's a very different kind of cultural understanding. But that's precisely it,
00:46:01.300that these big cosmological thoughts are ones that open up the possibility of joy and renegotiation
00:46:07.260and rebonding in a community. And what we have to do is rebuild that community. And it can be hard
00:46:13.100work, but certainly because it involves commensality and a sitting around a table and reimagining what
00:46:19.240that world will be like, it can be joyful. And I think that that's also one of the things that
00:46:24.420we wanted to get at with this history of the world and seven cheap things is that while
00:46:28.500capitalism may be moving towards crisis, society as we know it has to end, but our bonds of care
00:46:37.720for one another can be renewed through this reimagining. It can't be renewed individually,
00:46:42.440but it can and must be renewed collectively. And that's something that we look to movements
00:46:48.420around the world from La Via Campesina, the International Peasant Movement, to the Movement
00:46:52.720for Black Lives, to Native Lives Matter, Idle No More, LEAP. All of these organizations are ones
00:46:58.420that I'm very much hoping that listeners will be able to search for and connect with to find how
00:47:03.640it is that we all fit together in figuring out the puzzle for what to do as capitalism ends.
00:47:10.520Yeah, as capitalism ends, there's this desire to organize like you've been talking about getting involved with grassroots organizations and social justice organizations that we can as a collective bond together in and move through the hospicing of capitalism with these new dreams and visions and thoughts and questions about how we can.
00:47:40.520collectively move forward in a way that's regenerative and resilient. And I think about how
00:47:47.360looking at history that cultural evolution isn't linear and civilizations and, you know,
00:47:55.400whether that's capitalism or imperialism or, you know, going back in time have risen and fallen
00:48:00.360and cultural ebbs and flows, you know, just as the earth evolves. But I think thus far,
00:48:06.080Our historical resistance to capitalism has been constantly met with stronger and stronger backlash, especially looking over the past hundred years.
00:48:15.260And this narrative seems to be playing out before our very eyes.
00:48:19.300So looking at historical patterns of cultural evolution and their relation to now climactic shifts, I'm wondering if you think that the unprecedented stage that is the climate of now will finally be the straw that breaks the back of cheapness and capitalism?
00:48:39.980Well, I mean, it's breaking as we speak. I mean, the trouble is that there's, I mean, as I say, the rise in the number of people being killed as witches, the assassination of activists, all of this is a sign that the pushback is not going to be easy. And there's no guarantees. After the end of feudalism, capitalism was an accident. But the chances of us being successful as we move beyond capitalism are going to be vastly increased by the knowledge that we have that we can actually do something about it.
00:49:09.980But that's that's what it is that movements are for. And that's why I think we cannot stand alone and that we need to be aware of what it is that we're entering into, but entering into it joyfully and with the knowledge that we don't really have much of a choice other than to dream what those choices will be, because otherwise they'll be made for us. And that's not something that I think anyone wants.
00:49:33.300well thank you and as if there's anything else that you want to mention about how people can
00:49:37.880find your events or your speaking engagements or how people can learn more about your work
00:49:43.840um well i mean i'm at rajpatel.org and jason is at jasonwmoore.com i think um but uh do look up
00:49:51.480the movements i mean we're unimportant the movements i think are tremendous and whether
00:49:55.080it's moving for black lives or 350.org or the leap there are some incredible um you know groups
00:50:01.360La Via Campesina, Native Lives Matter. These are groups that deserve your attention to be able to move to a place where we can all together imagine the many futures that await us after capitalism ends.
00:50:31.360Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast.