Speaker 1: Five that day.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Minor Compositions. For this week's conversation,
Speaker 2: we are joined by two comrades who I've known so
Speaker 2: long since that I cannot actually remember when I met
Speaker 2: either of you. But it's been a long time. But
Speaker 2: maybe fifteen twenty years ago, a while ago, right, at
Speaker 2: least something like that.
Speaker 3: I think more No, not about that, about twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: I kind of met you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we're joined here by in.
Speaker 3: Fact, in fact, I think it was in Lancaster at
Speaker 3: some sort of seminar. Yeah, some sort of like super
Speaker 3: academic not an academic seminar.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I think it was at Leicester.
Speaker 2: It could have been at Leices well, it was an
Speaker 2: l place and anyways, some l place. But today we're
Speaker 2: joined by by Kirilburn and Nick Bairu. And I thought
Speaker 2: it'd be interesting to bring you tube together to have
Speaker 2: a chat because you for better, for worse, for your
Speaker 2: sins have both written books about climate change, ecology, crisis,
Speaker 2: and varying amounts of hope and or doom. So I
Speaker 2: thought it'd be interesting to sort of bring you to
Speaker 2: together and have a chat about that and see what
Speaker 2: we could make of that. So thanks for coming along.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for having us not to pick the timing
Speaker 1: and to interject with the gratitude.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you have to you have the time your gratitude.
Speaker 2: Otherwise it seems weird, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, I mean I only don't have gratitude. I just
Speaker 1: have hateful lists.
Speaker 2: Well that's even better. Speaking of hateful lists, all shout
Speaker 2: out to the recently departed basis of L seven who
Speaker 2: who who had her own many ship lists to go through.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so so we have two books here or
Speaker 2: something Worse and Radical Abundant, which I think are interesting
Speaker 2: pairing and maybe a way to start thinking through. There
Speaker 2: might be I think one concept that both of you
Speaker 2: share and play with in different ways, which is the
Speaker 2: nature of transition. And I it's interesting because first Nick,
Speaker 2: I think you start off by the idea that we're
Speaker 2: already in a transition, but it's kind of a crappy
Speaker 2: transition and tradition which which isn't going how we want
Speaker 2: it to go. And I would think in certain ways
Speaker 2: I think here, I think you share some of that
Speaker 2: so thedea that we're already in a kind of traditional moment,
Speaker 2: but it's it's maybe something to be fought over. So
Speaker 2: can we talk a little bit to start to start
Speaker 2: off at about that that idea for transition.
Speaker 1: It sounds good. How do you how do you want
Speaker 1: to how do you want us to get into it?
Speaker 1: You know you have to do some traffic light control.
Speaker 1: And because there's two of.
Speaker 2: Us, Oh okay, uh, well you go first, Dick.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like it's a good question, and I think
Speaker 1: it's it is, at least in my mind, is like
Speaker 1: three bits to it in terms of how I main transition.
Speaker 1: And I sort of say three bits because I'm not
Speaker 1: particularly I'm kind of like an x philosopher in the
Speaker 1: sense of it, I don't really have a lot of
Speaker 1: time for the PI the philosophical niceties of the concept
Speaker 1: of transition itself. Like I kind of tend to think
Speaker 1: of it in three ways. And the first is that
Speaker 1: we're in the midst of a sort of unraveling of
Speaker 1: a particular stable climate state, and it is in a
Speaker 1: transitional period. We are going through a transitional phase. And
Speaker 1: the transition the idea of being in a transition, being
Speaker 1: in a war of transition, at least for me in
Speaker 1: the beginning, you have to start with that sort of
Speaker 1: that sort of ecological reality that things are not stable anymore,
Speaker 1: and that throws up a series of must be academic,
Speaker 1: it's a novel events and novel sort of contextual and
Speaker 1: political economic challenges to the whole thing. So the first
Speaker 1: thing is we're in the middle of a climate transition,
Speaker 1: and that's a really big atmospheric sense, and there's also
Speaker 1: the rest of the global environment unraveling as well. But
Speaker 1: that's kind of the first one. The second one is
Speaker 1: and I think this is maybe one of the ones
Speaker 1: whereas more contentious is that actually, honestly, like I understand,
Speaker 1: there's lots of the traditional sort of environmentalist sort of
Speaker 1: line that there is no transition happening and we have
Speaker 1: to decry the lack of action, and then there's no
Speaker 1: movement and emissions went up last year and et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But I think if you take a like
Speaker 1: a like a sort of a sober reading of the economics,
Speaker 1: the legislative frameworks, political frameworks, ideas, that sort of whole ensemble,
Speaker 1: there is an actual change in the regime of capital underway,
Speaker 1: and like I kind of in the book, I call
Speaker 1: it the transition economy because it's kind of it's not
Speaker 1: a final state, but it is one that's being built
Speaker 1: out with state support in the ruins smoking ruins of neoliberalism.
Speaker 1: So I kind of mean both an ecological sense and
Speaker 1: in a yeah, there's an actual change in capitalist organization
Speaker 1: and regulation underway. And I think the third one, and
Speaker 1: I think this is maybe like a really just because
Speaker 1: I'm not a very good philosopher, like a really bad
Speaker 1: reading of bram scheme, Like there actually is a war
Speaker 1: of there's not just position in maneuver, there's actually something else.
Speaker 1: So what do you do when everything else is in flux,
Speaker 1: everything else is changing, when everything else is sort of
Speaker 1: in the process of disorganization. I think a period of
Speaker 1: transition is one where everything becomes immediately political and sometimes
Speaker 1: very random things become very political, very rapidly. So there's
Speaker 1: a breakdown in that stable ordering of spheres of culture, economics, politics,
Speaker 1: because everything, like the most random things can become immediately
Speaker 1: contestable and political that might take on it.
Speaker 2: So that was like when people say that there is
Speaker 2: no transition is happening tradition there is understood as being
Speaker 2: a deliberate, intended plan movement towards to something else. Rather
Speaker 2: than a thing which is just happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we can get into it later on.
Speaker 1: Like I think people have misunderstood what the transition climate
Speaker 1: change is just a means to an end for businesses.
Speaker 1: It's the objective is to a still economic growth after
Speaker 1: a really long period of economic stagnation. Like that's the objective,
Speaker 1: and then like we chip over ourselves to like is
Speaker 1: it real? Is it not real? Is it really reducing commissions?
Speaker 1: Is it not? Well, that's not that's not the point.
Speaker 1: That's kind of like that's it's one of the aims.
Speaker 1: That's kind of like a secondary aim like it's but
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's subordinate to the principal aim, which
Speaker 1: is to drive innovation, investment, the renewal of industries, the
Speaker 1: development of new contracts, some new kinds of green rent herism.
Speaker 1: It's like it's it's that's the main bit of it.
Speaker 2: So in that, I mean, tradition is really actually a
Speaker 2: process that is attempting to reinitiate a process of capital
Speaker 2: accumulation or capital valorization. Would that would that connect to
Speaker 2: what you talk about as bullshit abundance?
Speaker 3: It would do. Yeah, But let's stick to transition for
Speaker 3: That's what I'd say, is because I agree when when
Speaker 3: it raised the idea that like that there's a couple
Speaker 3: of crises going on at the same time basically, and
Speaker 3: so accelerating sort of ecological crisis is one of those two.
Speaker 3: The other one it's probably more actually, but like the
Speaker 3: other one would be economic stagnation. I think like that
Speaker 3: is like this, there's an overlap between those two. You know,
Speaker 3: obviously they compound each other to one degree or another,
Speaker 3: because like one of the effects of climate change in
Speaker 3: particular is just like increasing costs of everything basically just
Speaker 3: like building, do you know what I mean, which obviously
Speaker 3: you know, acts as as a form of exacerbates sort
Speaker 3: of the economic stagnation would perhaps we put it put
Speaker 3: it that way, basically, I'd probably add something else. So
Speaker 3: I probably think i'd add like a demographic crisis or something,
Speaker 3: which is also at the same time. It's not caused
Speaker 3: by those two, it sort of interacts of them basically,
Speaker 3: which is like an aging population. It's like a real
Speaker 3: big problem. And that goes back to that previous book
Speaker 3: Generation Left. You know, the the future looks different to
Speaker 3: you depending on how much how long you think you've
Speaker 3: got of that future yourself basically, and also just because
Speaker 3: of like you know, the way that the structure contemporarytructure
Speaker 3: of capitalism means that you know, wealth and assets are
Speaker 3: you know, generationally dispersed to some degree, which adds a
Speaker 3: such certain political block, which adds inertia basically to any
Speaker 3: attempt to try to try to change things in a
Speaker 3: direction that we'd like them to go in. We'd probably
Speaker 3: put it something like like that basically, But if we
Speaker 3: think about economic stagnation and like climate change, they can
Speaker 3: bound each other. But like you know, and at least
Speaker 3: at least if the the sort of like raw way
Speaker 3: you might think of it is that the solutions to
Speaker 3: those are intentions they sort of put in different directions.
Speaker 3: What's the what's the solution to economic stagnation, It's increased
Speaker 3: economic growth. So you can, you know, if you can
Speaker 3: do a climate an energy source transition, you can try
Speaker 3: to solve those two things. We seem to have given
Speaker 3: up on that one basically, and you know, we're just
Speaker 3: based well, these factions are capital are just going into
Speaker 3: an accelerationist sort of like you know, let's let's what
Speaker 3: you have to give up basically when you if you
Speaker 3: just embrace increased climate change, what you have to give
Speaker 3: up are like universe, any any potentials that universalists sort
Speaker 3: of solutions to this, you have like particular exclusionary positions.
Speaker 3: Basically you have fascism. Basically, that's one of the links
Speaker 3: to it, to this, I think. But I think that
Speaker 3: like the failed of the unpleasant capitalist transitions we've got
Speaker 3: going on, don't exhaust the possibility of what transition can
Speaker 3: be basically because one of the things, like the transition
Speaker 3: opens up, it opens up, you know, it opens up
Speaker 3: a temporal dimension to politics, which means that you can
Speaker 3: escape from the present basically the eternal present of capitalist
Speaker 3: and put it something like that. Particularly like it opens
Speaker 3: up a temporal dimension to like the strategy. Right, So
Speaker 3: it's like at the minute, we're caught in like a
Speaker 3: politics which is I have a firefighting I you know,
Speaker 3: we rush from one crisis to the other with the
Speaker 3: attempt that we might ameliorate them more likely on the left.
Speaker 3: Now that leads itself to just like a moralistic politics
Speaker 3: where you basically just sort of bear witness to each
Speaker 3: crisis whatever and say, well, I object. And that's because
Speaker 3: you know the space of possibility in the space of
Speaker 3: possibility of like you know, social economic and political possibility
Speaker 3: is always constrained under any particular configuration, but like at
Speaker 3: the minute, it's incredibly constrained, especially if you want to
Speaker 3: act on the left, which leads you to fire fighting
Speaker 3: or moralistic politics, do you know what I mean? And
Speaker 3: the idea of transition opens up this idea that you
Speaker 3: can act now within a constrained sense of possibility in
Speaker 3: order to increase the space of political possibility in the future.
Speaker 3: And in fact, that you could think of that that
Speaker 3: as another way of thinking of transition, basically adding a
Speaker 3: temporal dimension to to politics. And if we thought about
Speaker 3: transitioning that in that way, we thought about the current
Speaker 3: conjuncture in that way of like, what are the temple
Speaker 3: dimensions to this? Like, I think that opens up another
Speaker 3: way of understanding what the current conjuncture or the current
Speaker 3: iteration of capitalism is basically and why and why, like
Speaker 3: you know, any sort of like change towards even decalbonization
Speaker 3: seems to be so stalled and so difficult. And if
Speaker 3: we think about like that, the key sort of instruments
Speaker 3: of contemporary capitalism, apart from data centers, it would be
Speaker 3: things like you know, like debts, like assetization. By that,
Speaker 3: I mean like, you know, the tenancy even capitalism, like
Speaker 3: Thomas Picketty points out, et cetera, towards sweating existing assets
Speaker 3: rather than creating new assets. But you could also add
Speaker 3: like like financialized capitalization of new assets, so data centers,
Speaker 3: et cetera. That all of those are like claims on
Speaker 3: the future. There are claims on future earnings. And when
Speaker 3: you claim in those future earnings, you also use structuring
Speaker 3: the future or you're encumbering the future, as that new
Speaker 3: Timothy Mitchell book puts it basically, And so that that's
Speaker 3: that's the ward of transition for me. It's like who
Speaker 3: the transition is? Who can who can control the future basically,
Speaker 3: And so like in the in our book, all of
Speaker 3: that leads us to say, like, you know, the key
Speaker 3: battleground is over the is over the control over the
Speaker 3: investment function. What who decides what gets invested in? What
Speaker 3: of the imperatives that do that, and like what are
Speaker 3: the forms of like capitalization, et cetera, which allow that
Speaker 3: which which investment decisions then fulfill, et cetera. Feel that
Speaker 3: makes sense.
Speaker 2: One of the things I've been really struck by over
Speaker 2: the past few months or maybe past year, and maybe
Speaker 2: it shouldn't be surprised at all, but it has been
Speaker 2: the speed and the thoroughness which the UK Libor Party
Speaker 2: seems to have a better any sort of pretense to
Speaker 2: caring about about sustainability or collogy at all, and and
Speaker 2: it seems to have been basically all net zero targets
Speaker 2: almost immediately. But it sim the reason maybe maybe I've
Speaker 2: understand this incorrectly, but since to be part of the
Speaker 2: reason why that's happened is but how effectively certain right
Speaker 2: wing forces have frame issues around zero as being almost
Speaker 2: an involuntary austerity of like, oh, yeah, you're not gonna
Speaker 2: have Hamburgers or cars, and you want Hamburgers and cars,
Speaker 2: don't you, So like how could we have net zero?
Speaker 2: And it seems to be that there's interesting ways in
Speaker 2: which questions around transition are framed around almost exclusively in
Speaker 2: these kind of ractory cultural politics, around questions around what
Speaker 2: you would have to give up in a material sense
Speaker 2: in order to achieve the world not becoming an uninhabitable healthscape.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm just jumping because like so one of
Speaker 1: the things, one of the promises I made myself and
Speaker 1: I wrote when I finished the book. Is because like
Speaker 1: when you write a book, it's like you do like
Speaker 1: it's years of work and writing and research, and then
Speaker 1: the actual writing of the book takes like a absolute
Speaker 1: shed ton of time. I'm restraining my inner Australian to
Speaker 1: just lash out into curse words in endless stream, which
Speaker 1: is just familiar and comfortable to me. But I'm going
Speaker 1: to accept it up my comfort zone and not be
Speaker 1: dis really crass. But like, it takes a lot of time,
Speaker 1: but there's a temptation to park it and put on
Speaker 1: the shelf. But one of the things I've been trying
Speaker 1: to do is to continue the research work of the book,
Speaker 1: and I sort of sort of set up a sub
Speaker 1: stack where I kept I'm going through little aspects of
Speaker 1: the book itself over time, and one of the ones
Speaker 1: that came up one of the things that's come up
Speaker 1: a lot in the continual research because I live out
Speaker 1: in Suffolk in the countryside. For listeners who don't know
Speaker 1: where Suffolk is, Suffolk is imagine nowhere and then go
Speaker 1: further out somewhere else towards more or nowhere, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty much there and on the eastern bit, the bumpy,
Speaker 1: little bumpy bit of the island that's England, the we
Speaker 1: England's part of the island. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that's happened here is is it's this is a real
Speaker 1: sort of battleground, but not a normal battleground. It's it's
Speaker 1: it used to be a real conservative heartland, but it's
Speaker 1: now a battleground between the Green Party. It's like, on
Speaker 1: one hand, who are obsensibly the most left wing party
Speaker 1: in the UK, sorry, in in England. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go speak for the rest of the countries in
Speaker 1: the our glorious Kingdom and reform on the right. And
Speaker 1: one of the reasons this a bit of a long
Speaker 1: winded winding is because they've been trying and I emphasized,
Speaker 1: trying to use net zero here to generate a new
Speaker 1: kind of constituency and they're trying to do it in
Speaker 1: the same they're trying to replicate their playbook around migration,
Speaker 1: and I get to it in a secondment, it's not
Speaker 1: working for them. And we saw that last set of
Speaker 1: local elections and May they had to start rolling back
Speaker 1: some of their e reetric and that's coming apart at
Speaker 1: a local level, and there's two parts to it. And perversely,
Speaker 1: I don't think I like I would have a year
Speaker 1: ago if you'd said me, why I reformed talk about
Speaker 1: in net zero? I would have said exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's about because they want to try to make it
Speaker 1: turn into a kind of austerity. But when we look
Speaker 1: at what they're doing, it actually comes down to two things.
Speaker 1: There's two bits to it. One is is actually how
Speaker 1: the transition of heavy industry in places like England and
Speaker 1: Scotland is in the US is playing out. Which is
Speaker 1: it came with a series of promises. Like we're talking
Speaker 1: before about it's a change of political economy, it came
Speaker 1: with a series of promises. It was a series of
Speaker 1: promises to two men by men about manly industries, about
Speaker 1: restoring It was essentially as a story of like this
Speaker 1: is this green trend, this this inflation Reduction Act which
Speaker 1: is called the IRA, which I love. It's like this
Speaker 1: all this net zero stuff, it's going to be like
Speaker 1: we're going to have hard hats and manliness and like
Speaker 1: banging things and they'll we steal and like belching thrusting
Speaker 1: machines and they'll be awesome and they'll be jobs, and
Speaker 1: it was just bullshit. And there's lots of technical reasons
Speaker 1: why it's bullshit. From electrification more often than not leading
Speaker 1: to much simpler work processes, saturated global markets, like a
Speaker 1: lot of the industries across Europe in particular were export orientated,
Speaker 1: and without you know, if you lose market share in
Speaker 1: China and India, you don't have any more growth. There's
Speaker 1: a huge No, there's a lot of factors, but that
Speaker 1: all of them in the end package don't mean that
Speaker 1: those promises of net zero became associated with betrayed promises.
Speaker 1: If you look at the last two elections, the local
Speaker 1: and the national one, the number one reason people who
Speaker 1: used to vote for the Labor Party switched to reform
Speaker 1: was betrayal. So I think it's actually, at least for
Speaker 1: lots of workers. The selling point is that net zero
Speaker 1: is a betrayal.
Speaker 2: So could that be so simple as like you promise
Speaker 2: green steel, but green steel came with less people working
Speaker 2: in the factory.
Speaker 1: Even worse, and this connects to the second. It it's
Speaker 1: even worse in that the classic example when I was
Speaker 1: finishing the book was Tata Steel in Port Talbot up
Speaker 1: in Wales, it was going to close, it was losing
Speaker 1: a million, It was losing like a lot of money,
Speaker 1: like millions, like every day. It was just churning through money.
Speaker 1: And the Tata Steel the owner went to the UK
Speaker 1: government said well, if you give us some money to
Speaker 1: help us change from coal fired blast furnaces to electric
Speaker 1: arc furnaces. Yeah, we use recycled steel. Steel is the
Speaker 1: most recycled material on earth. Like, we've got plenty of
Speaker 1: We've got more scrap steel in the UK than we
Speaker 1: need for raw material. We'll go green and we'll protect jobs.
Speaker 1: It will just cost you half a billion quid a
Speaker 1: third of the cost. And the UK government starma political
Speaker 1: genius was like, yeah, fucking sold. There's gonna be weird.
Speaker 1: They're gonna get green steel. Port Talbot was one point
Speaker 1: five percent of all the UK's emissions carbon emissions, so
Speaker 1: you know, green win, job win, Like, get in there, fellers.
Speaker 1: They're now still giving them half a billion quid. Next
Speaker 1: day they sacked half the workforce. You just don't need
Speaker 1: as many people. So it's even worse because the betrayal
Speaker 1: comes not just from jobs not turning up, but because
Speaker 1: the government's paid for you to lose your job, and
Speaker 1: now the government technically did protect half the jobs. But
Speaker 1: that's part of reforms sell, that's part of the is
Speaker 1: the betrayals of the promises of the green transition. The
Speaker 1: second bit, in some ways is is more insidious since
Speaker 1: a hangover from neoliberalism. Like at a local level the earth,
Speaker 1: there are others sell reforms, others cell around here is
Speaker 1: that you know you're posing a wind farm, you're posing
Speaker 1: a solar farm. Net serea is gonna cost you money.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be load traffic zones, like, there's all the
Speaker 1: all the lockdown crazy is like climate lockdown is going
Speaker 1: to trap you in your neighborhood. There's just all this.
Speaker 1: There was this. There's lots of grassroots campaigns, some of
Speaker 1: them anti developments, some of them just whack you, but
Speaker 1: reformers trying to bring them in. They're trying to bring
Speaker 1: these two constituents together. And the way it works for
Speaker 1: local campaigners is that there's lots of disquiet. I don't
Speaker 1: want my field paved over, I don't want pylons, I
Speaker 1: don't want lots of trucks. Yeah dah, yeah yeah. But
Speaker 1: it all gets couched if you look at all the
Speaker 1: leaflets and the websites and the Facebook groups. It's all
Speaker 1: using that household budget myth that's underpinned the last like
Speaker 1: thirty years of government. There's only so much money. Governments
Speaker 1: have to balance their books, just like you have to
Speaker 1: balance your account book, Like if we spend money on
Speaker 1: that zero And look, they gave half a billion to
Speaker 1: that steel company to scrow over the workers. If you
Speaker 1: if you didn't give them that money, we wouldn't need
Speaker 1: to do this thing over here. We could fix the
Speaker 1: potholes in the road, which is the number one reason
Speaker 1: people vote for reformers potholes and declining high streets. If
Speaker 1: we didn't spend this money on pylons, we could fix you.
Speaker 1: We could make sure there was a bank in the
Speaker 1: village or a post office that would be open. And
Speaker 1: they've tried to use that neoliberal logic, and it's helped
Speaker 1: that the government constantly talks about how much money it's
Speaker 1: spending on green things, thinking this will make greenies happy,
Speaker 1: environmental it's happy, and it's used trying to use that
Speaker 1: against zero. So it's a kind of a long winded way,
Speaker 1: but they're the two things that are operative for reform now.
Speaker 1: It's important to note that it's not working because half
Speaker 1: these these you know, these campaigns against wind farms. It's
Speaker 1: full of Green Party members, local conservation groups and Friends
Speaker 1: of the Earth members. It's like it's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who don't want if you ask them, that we
Speaker 1: don't want to lose our only green space in our village.
Speaker 1: So people in London can have fucking supercharged much a
Speaker 1: lattes and like on their e bios as they zoom
Speaker 1: around doing like sort of bullshit finance crap, like why
Speaker 1: do we have to lose our green space for London?
Speaker 1: That's one of the most common responses. It's also there's
Speaker 1: already a million jobs in this kind of that are
Speaker 1: depended on net zero just here. It's it's it's in Lincolnshire,
Speaker 1: one of the places where reforms got the mayor and
Speaker 1: the local council. It's like it's one of the biggest
Speaker 1: sort of drivers of economic growth. It's growing at ten
Speaker 1: times the rate as a sector of the rest of
Speaker 1: the economy. So in Zense, reforms really trying to mobilize, betrayal,
Speaker 1: mobilize this. This is that rant household budget notion of
Speaker 1: our government spending works and they're really trying, but they're
Speaker 1: already starting to have to roll back where you get
Speaker 1: these weird things of counselors, Like now reforms new tactic
Speaker 1: is to say we're gonna undeclared climate emergencies. We're going
Speaker 1: to cut net zery spending so we can spend it
Speaker 1: on flood defenses. That's their new line, is that we
Speaker 1: need to stop spending money on climate change so we
Speaker 1: can spend money on climate change.
Speaker 3: Just to emphasize what Nick was saying, there was a
Speaker 3: report going around today saying that labors sort of declaration
Speaker 3: they were going to they were going to extend the
Speaker 3: rose Field oil oil field in the North Sea, that
Speaker 3: that would they estimate that would that would that would
Speaker 3: produce twenty seven direct jobs. Yeah, I mean you know,
Speaker 3: so if you're going to make that the core part
Speaker 3: of your rejection of of of green politics, do you
Speaker 3: know what I mean, you may as well like fucking
Speaker 3: open a open a pet shub, fox shopping, fucking leeds.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's preposterous. So that so that does
Speaker 3: make you sort of think, well why what what what
Speaker 3: is it? Then? Well, what's going on? It's not a
Speaker 3: serious economic strategy that there's no economics involved in that.
Speaker 3: Perhaps it is something to do political positioning, you know that,
Speaker 3: to try to trap the Green Party in the eco
Speaker 3: rather than the populist part of their their their their strategy.
Speaker 3: I don't, I don't know. Basically, I'm going to see
Speaker 3: how it. So it sort of pans out, I think,
Speaker 3: is that what you were asking, though.
Speaker 2: I'm not entirely sure were imagine you.
Speaker 1: Point I went off on a reform tangent.
Speaker 2: So I think there are interesting connections there about around
Speaker 2: battles around basically the shifting nature of common sense and
Speaker 2: how it applies to ecological issues here, and we were
Speaker 2: talking about is the way of being reframed as as
Speaker 2: a sort of a betrayal of certain things people people
Speaker 2: were promised in a way what I wanted to get
Speaker 2: to was also sort of bringing tears writing about different
Speaker 2: notions of abundance, which a way I think you could
Speaker 2: connect in terms of there was a problem around abundance
Speaker 2: and jobs, but that didn't happen, and so maybe you
Speaker 2: talk a little bit but the different ways in your
Speaker 2: book you talk about sort of varying conceptions of abundance
Speaker 2: and how that connects to let's say shifts in a
Speaker 2: kind of common sense or or lack of shifts to
Speaker 2: common sense.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, I mean, in a way the book was
Speaker 3: was an attempt. One of the aims of the book
Speaker 3: was an attempt to sort of sidestep this really stale
Speaker 3: debate between ecomodernism and a degro of or degro of communism.
Speaker 3: It's sometimes put in that sort of in that sort
Speaker 3: of way, which is to seem to go nowhere basically,
Speaker 3: and so we wanted to use this phrase of abundance
Speaker 3: radical abundance. We didn't know that a bunch of liberals
Speaker 3: in the US would also try to seize this frame
Speaker 3: of abundance to describe the risking of regime. And so yeah,
Speaker 3: in the book, we sort of make this distinction between
Speaker 3: bullshit abundance and radical abundance. And we always say that
Speaker 3: like this bullshit abundance always goes along with is always
Speaker 3: paired of artificial scarcity. Basically, so you have an abundance
Speaker 3: of certain things, quite often an abundance of the stuff
Speaker 3: you don't really need, and like a real artificial scarcity
Speaker 3: over the real essentials to live in a flourishing life basically,
Speaker 3: and our definition of bullshit abundance, or how we think
Speaker 3: bullshit abundance comes about is just be because of you know,
Speaker 3: the the imperatives and logic upon which investment decisions are
Speaker 3: made under capitalism, which is, you know, whatever promises to
Speaker 3: produce the biggest comparative profitability basically is the thing that
Speaker 3: gets invested in. And we'd say that, you know, the
Speaker 3: contemporary form or iteration of capitalism, you know, has made
Speaker 3: real DEALNK actually between between those sort that sort of
Speaker 3: decision making and like the enrichment of the capitalist class
Speaker 3: and the satisfaction of like of of working class needs
Speaker 3: or just or many people's need something like that, there's
Speaker 3: been an increasing bullshitification or end certification of Cory Doctrue
Speaker 3: sort of puts it basically, like I can really explain
Speaker 3: it by explaining so in you know, the book Radical Abundance.
Speaker 3: I didn't write that on my own. It's written with
Speaker 3: my two friends Cai Hern and Bertie Russell. And we're
Speaker 3: involved in like an organization called Abundance, which is like
Speaker 3: a sort of think tank or whatever however you want
Speaker 3: to put those sorts of things. But so we've been
Speaker 3: involved in actual projects where we're trying to get certain
Speaker 3: things off the ground. Basically, in one of those we
Speaker 3: got invited to this to a project to think about
Speaker 3: how you can make or to try to get pharmaceutical
Speaker 3: production as a commons basically commonly owned and governed pharmaceutical
Speaker 3: production of medicines, etc. And that that group was like
Speaker 3: it's a network across France primarily of the pharmaceutical engineers
Speaker 3: and pharmaceutical workers got often retired. Then health activists and
Speaker 3: that commons activists, et cetera. But like the the impulse
Speaker 3: we're getting that together. There were two impulses. One of
Speaker 3: them was One of them was the experience of the
Speaker 3: COVID vaccines basically, which were public private partnerships. I. All
Speaker 3: of the research was done by public come out of
Speaker 3: the public money, all of the profits went to the
Speaker 3: private firms. Fither five or six billionaires created in a
Speaker 3: year because of that. Basically, one of the decisions they
Speaker 3: made was that they wouldn't generic copies of those vaccines
Speaker 3: to be producing the global South. That probably killed a
Speaker 3: couple of million people. So that's a moral imperative to
Speaker 3: try to think of another way to do it. But
Speaker 3: the other thing that drove it was this real shortage
Speaker 3: of common generic drugs right across Western Europe basically and
Speaker 3: particularly in France, or like paracetamols, massive shorts of paracetamols,
Speaker 3: and why it's because you know, you can get producing
Speaker 3: paracetamos is profitable, you get like six percent profits or
Speaker 3: something like that. But like if you have intellectual property
Speaker 3: on a medicine and you get sixteen to twenty percent profit,
Speaker 3: that is the highest comparable profitability. So that's where investment goes, basically,
Speaker 3: And so you have all of these practices like you know,
Speaker 3: evergreening drugs, So that's when a company owns the patent
Speaker 3: on a medicine, but it's coming to the end of
Speaker 3: the intellectual property period, and so they'd spend billions trying
Speaker 3: to find a chemical combine which will mirror the effects
Speaker 3: of the existing medicine. And so basically what you end
Speaker 3: up is a bullshit abundance of like profits, but a
Speaker 3: bullshit abundance of of of drugs that do the same thing.
Speaker 3: We don't need them. If there's one drug that does it,
Speaker 3: you do you can have that basically, and you have
Speaker 3: a massive shortage of investment in things that we absolutely
Speaker 3: desperately need generic drugs, research into new antibiotics, all of
Speaker 3: these sorts of things. Basically, like and you in the book,
Speaker 3: we trace that that similar dynamic of artificial scarest in
Speaker 3: bulshing abundance through like a whole series of sectors. It's
Speaker 3: just repeated all over the place. Basically. One of the
Speaker 3: things you might draw from that strategically, especially this idea
Speaker 3: that there's that there's there's an increase in shitification going on,
Speaker 3: or there's a withdrawal of provision or a provision which
Speaker 3: has made so expensive it is basically a withdrawal of
Speaker 3: provision by capital around essential goods from wider and wider
Speaker 3: sections of the population. It opens up that sort of prospect,
Speaker 3: opens up the prospect of alternative ways of address seeing
Speaker 3: those core material needs basically you know, yeah, through through
Speaker 3: commonly under governed sort of production methods and all governance
Speaker 3: methods and these sorts of things.
Speaker 2: Do you think you can use that kind of framework
Speaker 2: to almost like respond to the way that Nick was
Speaker 2: talking about for the things at port Talbot. So for instance,
Speaker 2: rather than being the introduction of green technologies lead to
Speaker 2: job losses, that's the betrayal being more about like this
Speaker 2: is more efficient with this production technique, how can we
Speaker 2: use these product product capacities for other social useful ends
Speaker 2: rather than it being whether that move being experienced as
Speaker 2: being loss and sort of community damage.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, so one of the reasons
Speaker 3: we've raised this idea of radical abundance is so it's
Speaker 3: like this, if you're not going to use like comparative
Speaker 3: profitability to guide investment decisions under current conditions, I don't
Speaker 3: think you can do that, right, You have to have
Speaker 3: another mode of like of working out what you can
Speaker 3: invest in. Basically, so that's a form of various forms
Speaker 3: of planning, and we would like democratic planning, and that
Speaker 3: would be like people getting together and then trying to
Speaker 3: understand what they are deliberating upon, what their actual needs are,
Speaker 3: et cetera, in the process of negotiation through sort of
Speaker 3: like various levels of hierarchy of you know, nested sort
Speaker 3: of decision making structures so that you also encolude like
Speaker 3: wider society. And then you also have to include you know,
Speaker 3: non human nature, et cetera. You know that that is
Speaker 3: the way that's a precondition for like radical abundance, right,
Speaker 3: And so it's a little bit like this we cannot
Speaker 3: afford anymore. We cannot afford to indulge capitalism's bullshit abundance,
Speaker 3: basic and all waste that goes along with that base.
Speaker 3: We need to, you know, under conditions, we need to
Speaker 3: address resources as directly as possible to human and non
Speaker 3: human need. Basically, it's like an imperative, So that means, like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's not a question of like do we
Speaker 3: want more or do we want less? Right, if you
Speaker 3: want growth, you have to answer this question like, well,
Speaker 3: growth of what? Who decides what that growth is going
Speaker 3: to be? What imperatives are, make a structuring those decisions.
Speaker 3: Except if you want abundance or abundance of what and
Speaker 3: who decides? Basically that's like the core problem of the
Speaker 3: contemporary society. I think m.
Speaker 2: Kind of reminds me of some things proposed by our
Speaker 2: mutual friend Massive mood and jealous and the way he
Speaker 2: talks about value struggles right where we're talking about a
Speaker 2: struggle over actually what is considered to be a value
Speaker 2: in how you measure it and understand that. And it's
Speaker 2: almost like I think, in some ways both of your phramings,
Speaker 2: a better nocial tradition is a form of value struggle
Speaker 2: over how you measure consider what's important and how that understood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but you know it doesn't have to it
Speaker 3: doesn't have to start at that really high level. If
Speaker 3: you're talking about like a pharmaceutical productions facility in Leon,
Speaker 3: which is the one that we were biting over for
Speaker 3: you know, the profits from that we're going to go
Speaker 3: to you know, an organization we call a Common Association
Speaker 3: of Common Health Association who then decide how they get
Speaker 3: how they can invest that, and they can invest it
Speaker 3: in the local area perhaps, And like so they're having
Speaker 3: to prioritize what they want. They have to negotiate prioritize
Speaker 3: what they want, which is another way of saying, what
Speaker 3: do you value basically, and you negotiate that what you valued,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. So that's like a very
Speaker 3: practical thing. You know, you don't have to you don't
Speaker 3: have the whole point of like trying to think through
Speaker 3: transition not as something that happens after the revolution or
Speaker 3: not as something that happens after the Left government, but
Speaker 3: that happens now, which I totally you know, which it
Speaker 3: was just a chord I think with like this idea
Speaker 3: of a transition war you know, war between different forms
Speaker 3: of like transition. You know that that those sorts of
Speaker 3: struggles like value struggles start now, do you know what
Speaker 3: I mean? You can do that now basically, and they
Speaker 3: obviously already taking place when people are prioritizing and activity
Speaker 3: that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Well, part of why introduced it one to go for
Speaker 2: string is I think one thing I share with both
Speaker 2: of you is a preference for forms of organizing. They're
Speaker 2: based upon common space methods, democratic workplace management, community management.
Speaker 2: But I think one thing you see in a history
Speaker 2: of sort of cooperative organization, particularly workplaces, is a tendency
Speaker 2: to be conservative around technological change and prioritize job stability
Speaker 2: over over innovation and change that is, let's say, ecologically
Speaker 2: or beneficial in the long term. And that makes me
Speaker 2: wonder how you sort of balance out the tendency for
Speaker 2: workplace democracy to want to value security and job security
Speaker 2: versus these different levels of values in terms of that
Speaker 2: you also want to balance off. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: It definitely does, And I think but I think this
Speaker 1: part of the mechanisms, it's it's not just think in
Speaker 1: terms of how do you make a workplace democratic or
Speaker 1: how do you make an institution democratic, and in that sense,
Speaker 1: there was I'm always reminded like a line that Jerdy
Speaker 1: Dean had in one of her book on neoliberalism. I
Speaker 1: can't remember the title, and it was, like I remember
Speaker 1: reading it was to the anti globalization period, and you'd
Speaker 1: have like endless meetings and lots of consensus driven decision making,
Speaker 1: all the rest of it. And it occurred while in
Speaker 1: the broader society like you're basically dealing with a crisis
Speaker 1: of participation, you know, St. David Mar's ruling the voids.
Speaker 1: Sort of. That was that period which I was reminded
Speaker 1: of recently reading hyper Politics, where the nineties was written
Speaker 1: off entirely as a period where nothing happened, and I
Speaker 1: was like, that's just not how I remember the nineties.
Speaker 1: But there was a real there was a like a
Speaker 1: bifurcation between the silent majority who refused to participate and
Speaker 1: sort of activists, a global activist subculture that hyper participated.
Speaker 1: And Jodey's line was, you can't fix a lack of
Speaker 1: participation by creating new ways for people to participate. There's
Speaker 1: like a there's there's a there's a there's no way
Speaker 1: to fix it. There's no way to fix a deficit
Speaker 1: of democracy through procedural means. But so in that sense,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's the question of how do you
Speaker 1: organize in such a way as to facilitate participation in
Speaker 1: direct direct democracy and decision making wout assuming that everyone's
Speaker 1: want to get involved. I don't think that's the same.
Speaker 1: But I think that's a separate problem to the problem
Speaker 1: of technology and innovation. And the reason I wanted to
Speaker 1: put them separately was that there's there are tried and
Speaker 1: true ways of engaging with people, even people who are
Speaker 1: resistant to participating, ways they think that they feel heard
Speaker 1: and included. Pros says innovations, and I don't think democratic
Speaker 1: organizations lack you know. And there's been like we've kind
Speaker 1: of in the last fifty years gone from this myth
Speaker 1: of this heroic garage tinkra who more often than not
Speaker 1: was working class.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: There's this sort of autodidactic sort of idea that you'd
Speaker 1: gone tinker with things, you'd whole new colors or new
Speaker 1: kinds of engines and things like that. There was actually
Speaker 1: like the innovation was a bit of a crank's game.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like a thing for weirdos to
Speaker 1: do in their basements or garages, whereas now it's this
Speaker 1: whole industry that churns out an endless stream of innovations.
Speaker 1: Whereas innovation is not inherently something people in their workplace
Speaker 1: were opposed to. In fact, if you give people free reign,
Speaker 1: or you find ways to organize it or facilitate it
Speaker 1: towards purposeful ends, it actually there's no incompatibility between feeling
Speaker 1: secure in your work and participating democratically in the governance
Speaker 1: workplace and innovative and disruptive cultures. In fact, there was,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's the obvious thing to reach for as
Speaker 1: a Lucas plan, But I think a more interesting one
Speaker 1: is the series of innovation hubs that were organized in
Speaker 1: Ken Livingstone's Greater London Authority. They actually there were a
Speaker 1: series of innovation hubs that were working class community hubs
Speaker 1: where people came to work on innovative solutions to different
Speaker 1: kinds of technical and social problems. But I think there's
Speaker 1: I think you can disrupt your own workplace, in your
Speaker 1: own workplace practices, in your own technologies, but that's and
Speaker 1: I don't think that's in athema to workplace security. It
Speaker 1: does also mean that acknowledging the fact that most innovation,
Speaker 1: I think seventy five percent of innovation is what we
Speaker 1: call incremental innovation. It's like new flavors of toothpaste and
Speaker 1: shit like that. That's a big chunk of it. Another
Speaker 1: big chunk of it, say, like AI is literally just
Speaker 1: about it's like this another technique for tailor ism, another
Speaker 1: technique for sort of industrial organization, for de skilling workers,
Speaker 1: for controlling workers, for surveiling workers. And so if you
Speaker 1: get rid of those two kinds of innovations and we're
Speaker 1: just dealing with the residual like ten percent, there's no
Speaker 1: reason why they can't be compatible with a sense of
Speaker 1: social and job security and a democracy in a workplace.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, totally, And I mean you know that.
Speaker 3: So I think you're referring Stephen too like and sort
Speaker 3: of neoclassical critique and neoclassical economics critique of like co
Speaker 3: ops is that they would they would spend their increased
Speaker 3: if they Yeah, they spend profits on or surplus on
Speaker 3: increasing their own working improving their own working conditions. No
Speaker 3: bad thing basically should be involved, should be included in
Speaker 3: any any sort of governance of these sorts of things,
Speaker 3: they probably do need to be balanced with like wider
Speaker 3: interests basically, and you know, the solution to that we
Speaker 3: we we're really interested in this conception of public common partnerships,
Speaker 3: et cetera, in which you know, which the surpluses of
Speaker 3: one of of one public common partnership go to sort
Speaker 3: of like try to capitalize a new one, et cetera.
Speaker 3: But the whole point of that is to tie chains
Speaker 3: of these of these sorts of enterprises together basically and
Speaker 3: then try to tie them into coordinated networks and so
Speaker 3: like you know, just practically again we can go back
Speaker 3: to this sort of like this pharmaceutical network in France
Speaker 3: that one of the one of the organizations involved in
Speaker 3: that was the UPEN Insulin Network basically, who were like
Speaker 3: a group of researchers who were basically trying to do
Speaker 3: trying to work out, like, you know, how you produce
Speaker 3: insulin at scale without any intellectual property around it basically,
Speaker 3: so in which case, you know, basically you can really
Speaker 3: really fucking hurt the big farmer companies basically who you know,
Speaker 3: particularly in the US, charge incredible amounts for insulin, you know,
Speaker 3: and you know most innovation is basically public private partnerships.
Speaker 3: They could be public common partnerships, but most innovation takes
Speaker 3: place in public through publicly funded whole Marianna Mazacato stuff
Speaker 3: is all over this sort of stuff. It's like really
Speaker 3: just common sense these days, you know, the common no
Speaker 3: makes sense, you know. But the whole point of that is,
Speaker 3: you know, that could be a partnership, which is a
Speaker 3: public common partnership, not a public private partnership. Of course,
Speaker 3: Like there's all sorts of stuff that needs to take
Speaker 3: place there. You have to reform the structure of higher education.
Speaker 3: Well I've got good news for you, because British higher
Speaker 3: education is an absolute fucking free for no. I need
Speaker 3: to tell you all about that, you know, And you
Speaker 3: know it's a certain point that has to be reformed
Speaker 3: as well, do you know what I mean? Yeah, So, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: my my argument would be this. You know, I'm not
Speaker 3: like work as co ops, independent workers co ops existing
Speaker 3: on their own. They're great, They've got all sorts of
Speaker 3: good things about and them. We've got all sorts of limitations.
Speaker 3: The point is, you know, we have to use the
Speaker 3: state to de risk a transition to a green democratic economy,
Speaker 3: and that means, you know, you have to the state
Speaker 3: has to be involved in accelerating or de risking the
Speaker 3: massive expansion of these things and also creating structures upon
Speaker 3: which they can coordinate network and the population of like
Speaker 3: localities around them. Are you know, I can can take
Speaker 3: control over how those surpluses are invested, do you know
Speaker 3: what I mean? And these aren't This isn't like Pine
Speaker 3: the sky. This is like we're working with two boroughs
Speaker 3: in London at the moment to establish this things called
Speaker 3: popular Assets commissions, which are specifically designed so that local
Speaker 3: authorities do that. You know, there's a lot of things working,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of things to work out there, but
Speaker 3: like you can do this now, and like part of
Speaker 3: the reason you'd want to do this now is, you know,
Speaker 3: is because it helps to develop democratic capabilities. Basically, one
Speaker 3: of the ways to think about this is like we're
Speaker 3: trying to reverse the neoliberal institutional reform that took place,
Speaker 3: and you know, one of the one of the spin
Speaker 3: off effects of neoliberal institutional reform, not even spin off effects.
Speaker 3: One of the main aims of that was basically to
Speaker 3: basically insulate decisions, investment decisions from democratic pressure and basically
Speaker 3: destroy their democracy, like trained people to see themselves as
Speaker 3: competitive individuals at war of everybody else. You know, we
Speaker 3: all know that, we've all there, We're all in various
Speaker 3: states of either have been academics or academics or even academia.
Speaker 3: You know. That's what That's what the research assessment exercises.
Speaker 3: You know, all of your companions, all of your your
Speaker 3: your the people who you work with are now your
Speaker 3: competitors for scarce resources. They are not your they are
Speaker 3: not like, you know, the people who share your problems
Speaker 3: that you can do collective action with. That's a training
Speaker 3: and anti democracy. The only way to get out of
Speaker 3: that is to train people in participating on the really
Speaker 3: really important decisions. So not consultations. Basically, this is it.
Speaker 3: You have control of the resources, and you're going to
Speaker 3: what you decide is going to happen. It's fucking important.
Speaker 3: This is the way to have a massive impact on
Speaker 3: what happens in your local area. That is something that
Speaker 3: drives participation. I think you know what I mean. Not
Speaker 3: an assembly where you where where you just talk for
Speaker 3: hours and hours, and that is without consequence of decisions.
Speaker 3: You know, So I think that's one of the the
Speaker 3: answer to the problem of like the lack of participation
Speaker 3: is because we've been trained out of democracy and we've
Speaker 3: been excluded from having any any influence over the key
Speaker 3: decisions that structure our lives basically, and that's the task
Speaker 3: is to reverse that.
Speaker 2: So what I'm taking out of that is that the
Speaker 2: way you deal with sort of competing forms of value
Speaker 2: are it's not something that that's that that's really worked
Speaker 2: out in an abstract sense, but rather what are the
Speaker 2: institutional formations that nudge things into the ways that value
Speaker 2: gets created and sort of flows back into arrangements where's
Speaker 2: back into the commons. And when when Nick you said
Speaker 2: you were going to use Jody's line, I thought you
Speaker 2: were going to use my favorite Jody line, which which
Speaker 2: is of course gold and sex doesn't doesn't care if
Speaker 2: you was it living Brothers.
Speaker 1: Its golden Sex, Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 2: Doesn't care if you raised chickens. And that would be
Speaker 2: the sort of like the negative version would be, like
Speaker 2: you could have your little commons based arrangement that's so
Speaker 2: marginal no one cares about. So if the idea is
Speaker 2: there has to be a sort of nudging to an
Speaker 2: acceleration to a shifting of the commons, that's towards building
Speaker 2: kinds of common based arrangements that are democratically run to
Speaker 2: engage in socially useful production. Where we have nice, wonderful,
Speaker 2: wonderful watermelon politics that are great on the outside and
Speaker 2: red and black on the inside. How are we going
Speaker 2: to do that? Small, small questions, small questions, No problem,
Speaker 2: no problem.
Speaker 1: I mean part of the that that line of jourgyes
Speaker 1: is that gold miss sex very much. Do you care,
Speaker 1: along with most international financial institutions, if people anywhere outside
Speaker 1: of the global North had already been totally commodified kept chickens,
Speaker 1: were any of the means of subsistence. And I think
Speaker 1: that's like like that the one of the the go
Speaker 1: to points in the book, and this is raised, I
Speaker 1: don't name check it explicitly, but it's raised in a
Speaker 1: review of the book. Is that actually building out autonomous
Speaker 1: means of social reproduction, building out commons, building out a
Speaker 1: municipal politics, building out the social economy, like actually, they
Speaker 1: it's quite it can be. It's not. It's not spectacular.
Speaker 1: It's not like barricades and bricks and molotovs and sort
Speaker 1: of like it's not it's not a it's not a
Speaker 1: main character moment sort of politics, but building out an
Speaker 1: autonomy from hyper competitive market relations is key to any
Speaker 1: sort of successful resistance. And it's also like it's in
Speaker 1: that sense, it's like a it's a I don't mean
Speaker 1: the first crack Crack capitalism and books Pohn Halloway's like,
Speaker 1: there's lots in that book I disagree with it, but
Speaker 1: like the idea that you build down sort of your counterpower,
Speaker 1: not and not just merely sees existing forms of the
Speaker 1: state or whatever else that exists, or existing unions or whatever,
Speaker 1: but actually building out the alternative is really important. And
Speaker 1: I know that's I mean, that's part of the broad
Speaker 1: sway that the degrowth mementore or less took on Eric
Speaker 1: Wright's work on the social economy and real utopias and
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff is basically is this bible
Speaker 1: that here's a roadmap we can build these things out.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to me that's sort of like, and
Speaker 1: this is pure coincidences because I had, I know, I
Speaker 1: had absolutely no role whatsoever in the revival of municipalis
Speaker 1: sort of politics, particularly sort of as embody by Mandami
Speaker 1: in New York. But that's one of the things I
Speaker 1: talk about the book is that actually you kind of
Speaker 1: have to inscribe things at a local institutional level. And
Speaker 1: you know, like I very much like the the idea
Speaker 1: in Against and Beyond as a as a revolutionary framework,
Speaker 1: like you have to work within the institutions you have
Speaker 1: you have, you have to then work against them, and
Speaker 1: being in the union, having been in the unions forever,
Speaker 1: like you have to be in the union, you have
Speaker 1: to be against the union, but you also have to
Speaker 1: be beyond the union. You have to start building counter institutions.
Speaker 1: And I think it's the messy reality is that there's
Speaker 1: no way of getting out of them as the mud.
Speaker 1: You kind of just have to start building from where
Speaker 1: you are. And so I think that there's a I
Speaker 1: think at the municipal scale for me, is one of
Speaker 1: the it's kind of like it's a like a Goldilocks
Speaker 1: political situation in a lot of ways, like one you
Speaker 1: need if you want to have an impact on a
Speaker 1: state or a region like a nation state, sorry a region.
Speaker 1: You kind of the idea that one of the lessons
Speaker 1: from the populist wave in the sort of early twenty
Speaker 1: tens was without a sort of an organized base, there's
Speaker 1: almost no point in going straight to the top and
Speaker 1: seizing the ship of state or whatever it is. As
Speaker 1: it were, like, you kind of need of an organized base,
Speaker 1: and to have an organized base, you kind of there's
Speaker 1: no point to sort of arguing for the party or
Speaker 1: the union or whatever else. You kind of have to
Speaker 1: have a project because organizing works through projects. So organizing
Speaker 1: at a municipal level to seize the means of social reproduction,
Speaker 1: seize anchor institutions, sort of start to inscribe a positive
Speaker 1: politics exactly what's cure, what's talking about at a municipal
Speaker 1: level is a really it gives people a something to do,
Speaker 1: gives you, It gives you some victories that you can secure,
Speaker 1: and when you're winning, then you're growing in because that's
Speaker 1: what that's what people White people join in an organization.
Speaker 1: It's because they can see that the organization is winning
Speaker 1: and they think winning is possible. Coming back to the
Speaker 1: question of the future, and you also start to get
Speaker 1: some runs on the board to start to build out
Speaker 1: that counter transition, and then you'll have a chance of
Speaker 1: seizing bigger institutions. But you kind of need you need,
Speaker 1: you need a foundational you need a pillar or multiple pillars.
Speaker 1: And I think at least for me, that the municipal
Speaker 1: scale is the right scale to start to institute some
Speaker 1: of those those wins.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, it's also like you can look again
Speaker 3: at what the neoliberals did, you know, they they tried
Speaker 3: these things, they tried out then their institutional forms in
Speaker 3: local areas or sub municipal areas, you know, the London
Speaker 3: Doclar's development corporations, you know, you know specifically like we
Speaker 3: need to we need to insulate this so that this
Speaker 3: is an area where democracy doesn't apply. Basically, this is
Speaker 3: what they said about the London Docklands Development Corporation. And
Speaker 3: theny try out all of these new institutions like public
Speaker 3: private partnerships, et cetera. Try more on a local level.
Speaker 3: What you do your learning there, you know, and then
Speaker 3: you roll it out around the country. Is like the
Speaker 3: model that they took. You know, probably gonna have to
Speaker 3: do the same thing, hopefully do it in various places
Speaker 3: at the same time, et cetera. On on the on
Speaker 3: the sort of like the wider concept of like of
Speaker 3: like counter transitions, et cetera. I quite like the idea
Speaker 3: of the phrase dual biopower, which is something that Alberto
Speaker 3: Toscan has sort of used basically, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: and he's looking around at like successful successful. It's a podcast.
Speaker 3: You can't see me do an air quote successful social
Speaker 3: movements you know around the world, not all of you know,
Speaker 3: some of them we would be more in favor of
Speaker 3: than others. But like building out that dual bower biopower
Speaker 3: is you know, one of the ways in which you
Speaker 3: devel like it's proper power. Basically, when it disrupts the
Speaker 3: power of capital, the power capital has over us is
Speaker 3: well the power of investment. So capital strikes, capital flight,
Speaker 3: et cetera, or you know, proper strikes like you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, like the trucking strike in Chile they
Speaker 3: tried to bring down a l NDE before they had
Speaker 3: to go to a military coup. Do you know what
Speaker 3: I mean? You know, proper strikes just turn it off
Speaker 3: off being able to sabotage production. Basically, either we can
Speaker 3: do it or they can do it. Basically, but before
Speaker 3: we can get to the stage we can sabotage production.
Speaker 3: At this moment, to do disruptive work, we need to
Speaker 3: build a social base, as Nick says, basically, but I
Speaker 3: do think that like that trying to take over assets,
Speaker 3: these sorts of things, they also involve like contentious politics.
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean? You know, you're trying
Speaker 3: to you're trying to obstruct particular things, a gentrification plan basically,
Speaker 3: and you have to use all of the things that
Speaker 3: we're so familiar with and which give you a slight
Speaker 3: moment of like main character syndrome, as Nick was saying,
Speaker 3: you know, like you know, protests, et cetera, blockade all
Speaker 3: of these sorts of things. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Like so each you know, I've got this idea in
Speaker 3: my head. One way in which the public common partnerships
Speaker 3: can spread is that one helps to facilitate the next
Speaker 3: helps to facilitate the next. The self expansive dynamic of
Speaker 3: the commentary. But each one of those is a new
Speaker 3: site political struggle basically, which will involve like people coming
Speaker 3: together decided what they want, but also what they don't want,
Speaker 3: and then objecting and blockading what they don't want, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean? Both me and Nick were evolved
Speaker 3: in thinking about like this idea of the social strike
Speaker 3: back in the twenty and tens, which is probably like
Speaker 3: a decade ago now, and we were trying to think
Speaker 3: through about this of like how do you build the
Speaker 3: capacity to disrupt thing when we don't have you know,
Speaker 3: we don't have the same structure of production, but also
Speaker 3: like the same energy base as we did, do you
Speaker 3: know what I mean? The real forces of disruption were
Speaker 3: around well coal basically when coal was like the main
Speaker 3: energy source. That was when the working class was at
Speaker 3: its peak power basically, and you had like the you know,
Speaker 3: the growth of of autonomous working class cultures like in
Speaker 3: South Wales or I grew up, you know, it faded
Speaker 3: quite a bit better time I got there. And so
Speaker 3: now we have to think about well, like we have
Speaker 3: to think about what are the appropriate means of struggle
Speaker 3: around the developing energy source, which is renewables, which is
Speaker 3: probably not disruptive, but perhaps it does lend itself to
Speaker 3: like decentralized for alternative ownership models basically because it's something
Speaker 3: which isn't that it doesn't have huge, huge, huge, you know,
Speaker 3: capital costs. You can do it with small capital cost space,
Speaker 3: which means that we can access it and the power
Speaker 3: of capital's control of over investment is weakened because it's
Speaker 3: more available to like ordinary communities, et cetera. But then
Speaker 3: we have to they have to develop the social base
Speaker 3: from which we can then do disruptive actions. And I
Speaker 3: think you have to start it. You have to do
Speaker 3: it that way, rather than start with disruption and try
Speaker 3: to work back to the social base, which probably was
Speaker 3: the which was the mistake of extinction rebellion on all
Speaker 3: of the subsequent iterations.
Speaker 2: So we're thinking about ways to develop a kind of
Speaker 2: popular protagonism at the sort of municipal or local or
Speaker 2: real regional level. I'm gonna perhaps say something with what
Speaker 2: might embarrass myselfware telepist comes out at this moment. I
Speaker 2: think we're we're four or five hours into a Burnham government,
Speaker 2: so we has that been disappointing yet. I'm sure it's
Speaker 2: coming by tomorrow. But one thing I do see is
Speaker 2: that he Burnham seems to be more focused on trying
Speaker 2: to have more devolution and more regional power. Or could
Speaker 2: that be a sort of potential opening for attempting to
Speaker 2: develop more municipalistic forms of popular protagonism in the in
Speaker 2: the UK? Or is that a kind of trap which
Speaker 2: you run into and then discover is just the same
Speaker 2: problems as corbinism, but on a different scale.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, you know, anybody listening to this outside
Speaker 3: the UK, the UK has got like the one of
Speaker 3: the most centralized political systems in the world, as in,
Speaker 3: you know, previous waves of municipal socialism meant that all
Speaker 3: sort of like tax raising abilities, local tax raising and
Speaker 3: abilities were taken off, not all, but basically incredibly constrained basically,
Speaker 3: which means that local authorities they have very little power.
Speaker 3: They have incredibly constrained budgets because they have to pay
Speaker 3: for social care, and basically they can't do anything. And
Speaker 3: like so this is a you know, there's been a
Speaker 3: wave of new green administrations across London, etc. And that's
Speaker 3: what they you know, they open the books and it's like, well,
Speaker 3: what the fuck do we do? And like, you know,
Speaker 3: my answer to them has been, well, you need to
Speaker 3: unlock new resources in order to do stuff. The usual
Speaker 3: way you do unlocked new resources is you get you
Speaker 3: de risk private capital and give them your assets basically
Speaker 3: and access capital resources. But there's other resources out there,
Speaker 3: which is like the energy, knowledge and like activity of
Speaker 3: local people. Basically, you know, if you want to get
Speaker 3: things done, you can form the institutions upon which they
Speaker 3: start to do it. Do you know what, They can
Speaker 3: even go out and raise their own capital in various ways,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. So yeah, even in the
Speaker 3: most constrained form of like local government we have now,
Speaker 3: it is possible to do stuff and to do to
Speaker 3: try to initiate stuff. But like you know, there is
Speaker 3: that in and againstment beyond that, Nick said, basically it
Speaker 3: is all about trying to use the state to develop
Speaker 3: popular protagonism primarily outside the state, forming the institutions upon
Speaker 3: which popular protagonism can form out side the state. That
Speaker 3: might well mean assets, public assets being given over to
Speaker 3: the control of local, local people, local organized communities, these
Speaker 3: sorts of things. You know, it's the whole Stuart Stuart
Speaker 3: Hall quote about like you can have a partnership between
Speaker 3: society and the state. So in fact, this is more
Speaker 3: interesting than that. He says, as soon as the transition starts,
Speaker 3: you can have a partnership between society and the state,
Speaker 3: as long as resources in initiative are always passing from
Speaker 3: society from the state to society. Basically, an initiative doesn't
Speaker 3: get stuck with the bureaucracy of the state. He says that,
Speaker 3: and that's the task. Basically, that's the task I think
Speaker 3: any of these any form of like municipal politics in
Speaker 3: the UK, that's the task that they have to do. Basically,
Speaker 3: whether the whether these new forms of devolution around mayors,
Speaker 3: et cetera, all sorts of complications around that as it happens.
Speaker 3: I now know two mayors in London, which is the
Speaker 3: weird I'd be able to say that, but two friends
Speaker 3: of mine and mayre's in London. Now you know one
Speaker 3: of them has no budget and everyone has a small budget.
Speaker 3: You know that the way this fold rolls out I
Speaker 3: think will be they'll try to roll this out the
Speaker 3: Labor Party. I imagine this devolution in a way that
Speaker 3: maintains maximum control in the Westminster or Number ten North,
Speaker 3: depending on where Andy Burnham is that week. But they
Speaker 3: always open up possibilities for like for us to take
Speaker 3: control over over these new levels of municipal government. I
Speaker 3: think they always open up some some way in which
Speaker 3: you can use it against the way, against the purpose
Speaker 3: for which it was set up, if you know, if
Speaker 3: you want to put it that way.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like I have heard such a deep
Speaker 1: will of cynicism, and I think Andy Burnham is going
Speaker 1: to is just a it's just a nice just know
Speaker 1: that it's just starmer again. It's just it's like his
Speaker 1: record in Manchester is actually quite is quite appalling, including
Speaker 1: he already probably his first promise was to end rough sleeping.
Speaker 1: He promised exactly the same thing in Manchester and he
Speaker 1: didn't end rough sleeping, just in case anyone's gonna be
Speaker 1: shocked and surprised by that news.
Speaker 3: And he's done his best. Neck he's done his best.
Speaker 3: He's increased the amount of luxury beds in Manchester. It's
Speaker 3: a shame the homeless can't access them.
Speaker 1: But there's I think there's there's a couple of things
Speaker 1: so like like I'm not sure if it maybe will
Speaker 1: afford opportunities, maybe won't. We kind of have to be
Speaker 1: mindful of that. We also have to then think about
Speaker 1: what the who would be able to seize those opportunities,
Speaker 1: because we also have to bear in mind like they've
Speaker 1: also labored just passed a law changing planning law to
Speaker 1: basically make impossible to oppose data centers and anything they
Speaker 1: want to build out. They're going to build out with
Speaker 1: these new with these changes to planning laws. But I
Speaker 1: think there's if we're coming back to that question of
Speaker 1: antagonism building up, alternatively, think there's there's two There's two
Speaker 1: sort of agents that we can we can think about
Speaker 1: in terms of classic organizing strategies. The first is actually
Speaker 1: the people install all this energy infrastructure. So you know,
Speaker 1: most of the workforce is it's not a manufacturing workforce
Speaker 1: in this country, it's an installation workforce, where like actually
Speaker 1: lots of lots of jobs that you know, we'd consider
Speaker 1: industry increasingly look like basically just assembling pre made parts,
Speaker 1: or assembling pre made bits of code, or putting together
Speaker 1: pre made bits of design items. Like almost any sort
Speaker 1: of like anything that can be serialized has been done.
Speaker 1: So so now we just have these massive installation and
Speaker 1: assembly workforces. They go around usually from site to site,
Speaker 1: putting stuff together, plug and stuff in. Now like that
Speaker 1: seems like an itinera at workforce, small scale lots of
Speaker 1: small businesses, et cetera, et cetera. There is a union
Speaker 1: in Australia called the Electrical Trades Union trade union, so
Speaker 1: basically electricians people install solar panels like et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And they managed to do it an organizing drive and
Speaker 1: it was just they just used a different model. They
Speaker 1: actually had had to spend time going from site to site,
Speaker 1: traveling around, going to where this's like where tradees would
Speaker 1: hang out, going to where the pubs, to all the
Speaker 1: different places it makes to unionize that sector. And it's
Speaker 1: one of the most was when I left one of
Speaker 1: the most left wing and pro environmental sectors because almost
Speaker 1: all their work was doing like green energy installation work,
Speaker 1: so of course they had a massive interest in it.
Speaker 1: All that's to say it just because it's an installation workforce,
Speaker 1: there are challenges to organizing it, but doesn't mean it
Speaker 1: can't be organized. And I think that there's one of
Speaker 1: the institutions we have to be in against and beyond
Speaker 1: other unions that we have, because our unions are pretty shit.
Speaker 1: And you know the fact that gmbing United, the two
Speaker 1: of the three biggest unions in England, came out for
Speaker 1: more oil and gas exploration, even though it's a fraction
Speaker 1: of their membership and against the interest of most of
Speaker 1: their memberships. That's kind of the that's part of the course.
Speaker 1: We've all, like anyone who's been in the union knows
Speaker 1: that how much of benefit it is just to get
Speaker 1: them to defend your intro led alone go anywhere further,
Speaker 1: like like unions whenever, Like if every time I encounter
Speaker 1: my own union bureaucracy makes me feel it's the most
Speaker 1: enraged ultra left I ever get. But I think like nonetheless,
Speaker 1: like like the state unions are a train of struggle.
Speaker 1: They're not like a vehicle for our emancipation. There are
Speaker 1: things we have to like sort of they're like being
Speaker 1: trapped in like a sleeping bag. You know, when you
Speaker 1: go camping with your mates, you drink too much night
Speaker 1: before you wake up, and you sleep bag and you
Speaker 1: have to fight to get out of it. I kind
Speaker 1: of feel like that's a metaphor for my life in unions.
Speaker 1: But like we have to make them the vehicles that
Speaker 1: we want to do the things we need, and organizing
Speaker 1: that actual installation workforce is definitely a part of it.
Speaker 1: One of the vehicles that we can use positively for
Speaker 1: that is it comes at the other end, is like
Speaker 1: once you've installed them, like you're dealing with a distributed
Speaker 1: energy generation system, someone has to own the means of
Speaker 1: energy production in the instance and there are two interesting
Speaker 1: aspects to that one around here again like one of
Speaker 1: the things that some green putty member we're doing. We're
Speaker 1: going from it's like parish to parish, village to village,
Speaker 1: town to town and trying to organize community energy cooperatives
Speaker 1: and then networking them. So there you're using party infrastructure
Speaker 1: to create a network of energy community energy projects. Which
Speaker 1: again it's that's quite like, that's not it's not thrilling.
Speaker 1: It's not like, oh, I'm going to my community co
Speaker 1: op meeting, energy co op meeting and shoesday night. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a rage that this is awesome. It's
Speaker 1: like back doing you know, raves and fields back when
Speaker 1: I was twenty one, like getting bumps from some of
Speaker 1: the rando and the back of a's trashed out car. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not, it's not that, but it's critical work to
Speaker 1: try to organize that necessarily so you can you can
Speaker 1: also organize the producers, which is it's politically. It then
Speaker 1: opens up some interesting questions around well, what do we
Speaker 1: consider the popular classes, because that's kind of a bit
Speaker 1: petty bourgeois. Really, isn't it like sort of running your
Speaker 1: own sort of co op as a producer or worse
Speaker 1: you could do Like in Australia, what they've got is
Speaker 1: there are now so much is so much rooftop solar
Speaker 1: where every single house is an energy station that the
Speaker 1: only way of dealing with it is that they're now
Speaker 1: bringing a law it'll be complete by October that every
Speaker 1: Australian as long as you have a smart mate, it
Speaker 1: gets three hours of free electricity every single day. And
Speaker 1: that's that's not even a radical claim. It's just there's
Speaker 1: an excess of energy. So they have to get rid
Speaker 1: of it somehow. They have to get rid of it
Speaker 1: during peak production. So they're saying, if you if you
Speaker 1: use it during peak productions, say one to four every
Speaker 1: three so please just plug in whatever crap you have
Speaker 1: and get it done at that point in time. So
Speaker 1: but again we're dealing with millions of petty producers. And
Speaker 1: so there's the one is that there's that space, that
Speaker 1: organizing space that exists for a competent organizing union, which
Speaker 1: the Left would feel very comfortable with. Then actually have
Speaker 1: these two sort of community based generation, individual based generation
Speaker 1: that offers some really interesting or afford some really interesting possibility,
Speaker 1: like in Australia, like they have negative energy prices and yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a sort of Bloomberg was complaining, Oh, no one
Speaker 1: wants to invest in the Spanish renewable sector because there's
Speaker 1: negative prices, there's no return. I'm like, well, the way
Speaker 1: they dealt with that in Australia is that they basically
Speaker 1: they're just going to give it away for free, and
Speaker 1: then the government itself is having to convince all these
Speaker 1: small petty producers that that's part of how everybody wins.
Speaker 1: And there so there's like that was and that was
Speaker 1: done by like a right wing labor government. That wasn't
Speaker 1: done by a radical eco populist party. But I think
Speaker 1: there are there are two spaces where we can definitely
Speaker 1: drive for drive forward a different kind of agenda. One
Speaker 1: is probably far more comfortable for the self identity of
Speaker 1: the left, but another one kind of means we have
Speaker 1: to venture into questions of class composition, changing class composition,
Speaker 1: what does it mean to engage with petty producers and
Speaker 1: small owners. But as a as a potentially uh progressive
Speaker 1: or even radical social agent, I.
Speaker 3: Think that like you're right to bring up like class
Speaker 3: composition berfectly and like you know, there's a technical composition,
Speaker 3: and there's a political composition. Basic the political composition is
Speaker 3: a project like I think exactly like if you're if you're,
Speaker 3: if you were pulling people into like why why the
Speaker 3: petty booge wise like this politically ambitious, ambiguous class and
Speaker 3: it's cletarly ambiguous because they face you know, they're they
Speaker 3: they're small sort of like this, but they face the
Speaker 3: world of small individual units of capital basically usually not
Speaker 3: capitalist as in usually not trying to grow into something big,
Speaker 3: but just trying to survive. Basically classic anxious subjectivity, you know,
Speaker 3: a classic base for like fascism and like what well,
Speaker 3: what what happens when you pull all those people into
Speaker 3: uh you collectivize a particular part of their fixed capital basically,
Speaker 3: you know, they're drawn into the democratic deliberation over you know,
Speaker 3: essential part of their work. All of a sudden, they're
Speaker 3: not facing the world as an individual separated from over
Speaker 3: the else in competition. They are faced facing the world
Speaker 3: from the perspective a collective capital, basically a collective ownership,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: With farmers all the time, like the weeperwards, what they
Speaker 1: are is like the co opse for like for petty
Speaker 1: farm producers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like you know, basically it's a
Speaker 3: way of intervening by creating those sorts of institutions whereby
Speaker 3: they can come together and collective. Like farmers should be
Speaker 3: able to collectivize their fixed capital costs in order to
Speaker 3: be to not be lost bleat makers anymore. That was
Speaker 3: one of the proposals we make in the book basically,
Speaker 3: and like that that what that would mean was that
Speaker 3: farmers would then have to and you know, the other
Speaker 3: propos in the book is that there should be a
Speaker 3: movement from industrial agriculture to to agreen ecological agriculture, and
Speaker 3: that that is a period that transition needs to be
Speaker 3: derisked because as periods when you're not going to earn money.
Speaker 3: And the way you would do that is to have
Speaker 3: people collectivize their income stream, so that one farm is
Speaker 3: subsidizing another as they move through that transition process, etc.
Speaker 3: But like the political composition effect of that is, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, they're not individuals or individual families. They
Speaker 3: having to think about, like you know, the world through
Speaker 3: collective problems from the point of view of collective property.
Speaker 3: Basically the same of like the same of like you know,
Speaker 3: the Ward's Corner Latin Village Market in Tottenham, which is
Speaker 3: one of the projects were involved in creating a public
Speaker 3: common partnership. They're small stallholders, lots of them, like you
Speaker 3: know from Latin America, et cetera. You know, classic petty
Speaker 3: bourgeois you would think. But all of a sudden, now
Speaker 3: they're collectively managing their market, neglective managing you know, the
Speaker 3: building that it's in, and they're taking part in deliberations
Speaker 3: upond which how to use that investment to try to
Speaker 3: improve the local area. So the negotiations of everybody are
Speaker 3: all of a sudden they are democratic subjects and not
Speaker 3: individual fraction parts of capital. Basically, that doesn't solve all problems,
Speaker 3: but it adds an element where buy that the political
Speaker 3: composition of that the petty boucheoise is self employed, et cetera.
Speaker 3: You know, it's changed, basically, and I think that's you know,
Speaker 3: class is not something that's fixed, it's not something that's given.
Speaker 3: It's it's a project basically that we have to work on.
Speaker 2: And I think that that sort of in some ways
Speaker 2: it brings us back to where we started, which is
Speaker 2: almost like the project of sort of like shifting sense
Speaker 2: common sense through institutional forms in moments of transition. How
Speaker 2: you do that rather than that that that shift being
Speaker 2: opposed upon you and ending up with to use someone's
Speaker 2: phrase or something worse.
Speaker 1: See what he did there?
Speaker 3: Nice?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I think that might be a good point
Speaker 2: to get to. So I just want to say thank
Speaker 2: you both for coming along. That was super interesting, and
Speaker 2: for folks listening, I would suggest you pick up a
Speaker 2: copy of both Nick and Keir's book. So not not
Speaker 2: just here, it's also Kir and Bertie and Hi Guy's
Speaker 2: book which is available from Versaill and Pluto, who are
Speaker 2: good comrades. So thanks for coming along, Thanks for having
Speaker 2: seven
Speaker 1: H