Ep 384 - Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism's Assault on the Earth System with Ian Angus

Steven Grumbine: 00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. Today's guest is Ian Angus and I want to express how interesting this guest is.

The book that he is going to be discussing today is called Metabolic Capitalism's Assault on the Earth System.

cene, A Monthly Review Press,: 2016

Ian Angus: 00:01:22

Thank you very much for having me.

Steven Grumbine: 00:01:24

Absolutely. This book is really interesting.

It plays off of some stuff that we've covered recently with guys like Errol Colassi, who wrote the Physics of Capitalism. And we've talked to a lot of other folks too about the interrelatedness of all things.

And, you know, it's really important to understand the domino effects of way a decision made over here impacts so many things, so many unseen things, things that we don't necessarily relate to one another, but they are tied together through a complex web of systems that keep us alive, quite frankly. And I think your book is really excellent in terms of tying all that together.

Can you give us just an overview of your book and kind of explain where the genesis of writing this came from?

Ian Angus: 00:02:13

Well, the concept of metabolic rifts sort of emerged as an important subject within Marxism and ecology over the past 20 years and really over the past five or six that it's gotten a fair bit of exposure. It goes back to Marx.

You know, I can say at the beginning, if you went around 20 years ago and asked even most Marxists, what did Karl Marx have to say about ecology? The typical answer would have been, well, he didn't really have anything to say about that. Nature wasn't big on his agenda.

He was just interested in factories and so on, well, it's literally not true. The only way you could say that is if you haven't actually read what Marx wrote. Now, he didn't have our contemporary vocabulary.

The word ecology hadn't been invented when he wrote on this subject. And even the word metabolism, which I'm going to use here, didn't exist in English.

When he was writing, there was a German word for it, stockfishel, but he was writing in German. But one result of that is even the first translations of Marx's work didn't include what he had to say about this or used other words.

And so when you go back and look at it, it's hard to say, oh, that he's talking about a modern ecological subject. But in fact, he was.

And what he talks about, beginning with some of his earliest writings, is the fundamental connection between human existence and the natural world around us. He says somewhere that we have to remain in constant dialogue with nature if we are not to die. It's a constant exchange. And this occurs on.

You can think of this in many, many ways, but possibly the one that almost anybody is familiar with is the fact that animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and plants inhale carbon dioxide and exile oxygen.

So you have a cycle that goes on there and keeps the overall content of our atmosphere roughly even over time, so that we can, both plants and animals can live in it.

The concept of a metabolic rift then emerges in Marx's writings a little later, where he points out that the way capitalism works is it tends to take things from nature and not put things back. And he would be talking mainly about agriculture, where farmers take plants out of the earth or take all the things they grow.

Historically, they would have been feeding themselves and their neighbors, but with the coming of capitalism, they were shipping that food off to markets to be eaten elsewhere. And the nutrients that were in that food ended up being discarded, going into sewers and rivers and not going back into the Earth.

articularly in England in the: 1840

And that then forced the development of artificial fertilizers on a large scale because the natural cycle was interrupted.

That's a beginning of a discussion of what turns out, as scientists have learned over the past century and a half, that the entire Earth system functions on this basis of biogeochemical cycles, things that are constantly being cycled and reused and reused. Nature is the ultimate recycler, and it comes in conflict with a system that works in a linear way.

It takes things from nature and then just discards the waste Product rather than reusing it, rather than returning it to the soil or the air or the water.

Steven Grumbine: 00:05:50

Very powerful.

And I think that kind of continuity, that cyclical nature of matter is an important point in Marxism in general, you know, especially for those of us who've recently just sort of bumped our heads into historical and dialectical materialism, understanding kind of that approach to the connectivity and the way things come to be. And it was very illuminating to kind of think differently.

I mean, it's a totally different way of thinking than I think most people have been trained to believe and think as well.

One of the things I wanted to bring out from your book, and I think it was really powerful, was you mentioned how Marx discussed this stuff, and people didn't really, you know, believe that Marx discussed this stuff, but it wasn't just him, it kept going. And you detail this. Well, you talked about August Bevel, you talk about Karl Kotsky, and you talked about Nikolai Bukharin.

Can you talk about the lineage of people within the Marxist segment that actually discussed this? Because I think it's really important to know that it wasn't some isolated thing that thus saith the Marx, it kept going. It was bigger than that.

Ian Angus: 00:06:59

That's very true.

You know, and in fact, when John Bellamy Foster, who was really the first person to write in modern times about the metabolic rift, a very common criticism was, oh, well, that's just a few passages in Marx, and then there was nothing else. So it wasn't very important. Well, you have to go back and see what actual socialists of Marx's time were talking about, what they were saying.

Well, first of all, Marx talked about it a fair bit, especially in Capital, which was his major work. His major comrade and coworker Engels talks about this whole problem of cycles and metabolic rifts and a number of his important works.

But then, and this is things I'm talking about in my book that I haven't seen elsewhere, somebody like August Bebel, who was.

f socialist ideas in the late: 1800

And it's got an extensive discussion of these issues of the cyclical nature, in particular of agriculture and the need to return nutrients to the soil and so on. And then Karl Kautsky, who was the principal theoretician of German Marxism, he was the capitalist Press used to refer to him as the Pope of Marxism.

He edited all the major journals. And he was, as I say, the principal theoretician in European socialism right up until World War I.

And he wrote a book called the Agrarian Question and what Was Going on in Farming. And once again, he went into those ideas in great detail. And both Webel and Kautsky knew Marx and Engels personally.

And they, in addition to having read their work, they would have discussed these questions. These were things that were just on the agenda for socialists at the time.

And the third person you mentioned, Nikolai Bukharin, well, he's the next generation. He's one of the leaders of the Bolshevik party, part of Lenin's Central Committee, the people who made the Russian Revolution.

textbook that he wrote about: 1921

The Russian Communists published as a textbook to train their members in the ideas of Marxism.

t Union beginning in the late: 1920

But again, it's a book about Marxist theory and it deals at considerable length with this question of metabolism in nature and the need for a new society that builds itself around this constant recycling rather than in simply churning out waste.

Steven Grumbine: 00:10:14

Sure.

You know, I, I appreciate the feedback there, because when I think about the various voices of the time, I don't want to relitigate Stalin, Trotsky, all that stuff.

I mean that, my goodness, there's probably a billion hours of back and forth that people go through, breaking down that long, you know, entire discussion. And we're not any different. I think we've done it a number of times too, here.

But I think it's important to kind of realize for those that are, you know, because in my circles today, there is a distaste for various people to say, well, I'm an eco socialist. It's like, well, why aren't you just a socialist? Marx was a. So.

I mean, he said these things, so why do you have to differentiate that you're an ecosocialist. What, why does that matter? Why do you need that differentiator I mean, bottom line is, we're fighting capitalism.

You're still dealing with the same things. I don't understand the distinction.

But on the flip to that, I oftentimes hear the flip side with people like within the ecosocialist degrowth movement who kind of focus on the concept of, hey, I gotta shock you into waking up. Let me at least throw a piece of dynamite into the lake to bring the fish up to the surface so you'll at least pay attention to it.

Guys like Jason Hickel, who we've talked to a bunch of times, spoke to the fact that it may not be the greatest name, but it gets people talking. And I think that's key here because none of us really have power right now. So the idea here is socializing these ideas.

Can you explain to me how we take a move from theory into kind of like the physical reality? I think a lot of people read these theoretical pieces and they see words that are not really common vernacular of their time.

They're just strange words that are of yesteryear. What does this translate to in reality, what we're talking about here? All the theory aside, what is the physical outcomes of all this?

What are we talking about, Ian?

Ian Angus: 00:12:14

Well, on the issue of sort of that term ecosocialism, I was among the people who adopted that term early, and I certainly went through many discussions, including with many Marxists who would say, well, why do you have to say ecosocialism? Surely we will get socialism, and that will solve all of these problems, so we don't need to talk about it as anything particularly special.

And my response then and my response now is, well, capitalism, the system we're trying to get rid of, one of the principal things it is doing is destroying our planet. Destroying in particular the. The Earth system, the conditions on Earth that have made human life and human civilization possible.

And focusing on solving those is going to be a huge part of, not only of building a socialist movement today and the things that we fight for and the changes that we try to make, but in a socialist society, these problems aren't going to go away immediately. It's not like, you know, when the revolution will come, suddenly everything will be green and solved.

If we haven't actually thought these things through, you know, we will inherit the incredible damage that capitalism has done and continues to do. I mean, at a very simple level, imagine that, okay, tomorrow we have socialist governments everywhere.

Well, you know, one thing that's going to happen is that the ice caps and all the glaciers are not going to stop melting because of the increase in temperature that's already happened. So the oceans are going to be rising for centuries. Well, that means that the new society is going to have to deal with. How do we deal with coasts?

How do we deal with this enormous number of cities that are built right on coastlines? How are we going to solve many of the problems of areas of agriculture where the rising sea level will put salt into the groundwater?

And that's not something that can just be magically wished away. It means that socialists need to pay careful attention to these subjects.

As I've said on a couple of occasions, there's sort of a tendency, or there was. It's tended to go away. But among socialists and socialist groups, sort of, you know, ecology and environmental problems are sort of.

Let's add them to the list of things that we don't like. You know, it's like it's just another stick to beat capitalism with. Well, it isn't just another stick.

It's one of the fundamental questions of the continuation of civilization and ultimately the survival of our species that we have to make central to our activity has to be part of our program at a very.

A big part of our program, a big part of the activity that we engage in has to be building movements around this and explaining to people how capitalism is responsible.

Many people are certainly aware of the environmental destruction that goes on, but there's often a tendency to say, oh, well, sooner or later the government will wise up. Well, the market analysis says they haven't wised up for many decades and they're not going to.

And there's a reason for that, and that's that ecological destruction is actually built into capitalism's DNA. If we don't understand that and we don't stress that, we are not going to solve it.

Steven Grumbine: 00:15:31

Ben, I couldn't agree with you more. I am not one of those people that feels like, I think, sometimes just hand waving.

And again, we have completely divorced ourself of class consciousness in this country. I don't know that we ever really had it because we didn't go through some of the development that the rest of the world did.

United States is kind of a unique empirical project, if you will, genocidal project at that. But when I think about the idea of specifying the tools of the trade, if you will, capitalism, sure, it's a big word.

It kind of carries a lot of meanings. But there's phases of capitalism, the tools of capitalism, the morphing, the virus of capitalism continues to shift.

And we've been through this neoliberal phase of capitalism. It's still just capitalism, but it's a very specific set of tools that they've pushed forward.

We're at a different phase of its life cycle, if you will. And I think ecosocialists is a great term. I think it's important to center what's going to kill us first. So I'm in a complete agreement on that.

I do want to bring up from your book one of the things I really found fascinating. And I want to keep with specifics here because I really want people to be able to come back, look at this podcast and go do research on their own.

Don't just take our word for it. Look these things up. Read your book, look them up.

But you talked about various scientists, like justice von Liebig, I believe, is the way you pronounce it.

Ian Angus: 00:17:01

That's right.

Steven Grumbine: 00:17:02

Or Liebig, Vladimir Vernadsky and Barry Commoner, for example. I'm curious, can you talk a little bit about the work, the natural history these folks did that help build this knowledge and help build your thesis?

Ian Angus: 00:17:19

Well, what I tried to do in the book was sort of tell two parallel stories.

One of them I've already been talking about, and that is how these ideas of the metabolism of nature, Marx calls it the universal metabolism of nature. One story is the story about how that went through the socialist movement, how socialists carried those ideas into the 20th century.

And then the parallel story, which was never totally never separated from Marxism, but which was done by different people, was the evolution of a group of scientists who made the underlying discoveries in natural science that fed and reinforced the whole theory of metabolic rift. Justus von Liebig is one.

basically, think in terms of: 1825

He published hundreds of papers personally.

, excuse me,: 1840

the Great stink, where around: 1857

elled so bad in the summer of: 1857

And that triggered a whole lot of interest in how you can deal with this. And it in fact resulted in the development of the whole London sewer system, which up until then, they simply hadn't had sewers.

And Marx was a great follower of Liebig. He's probably the most influential scientist in terms of Marx's view of metabolic rift. Marx says somewhere he wrote a letter to Engels.

Well, Marx was writing Capital, which was of course, his life work. And he said he'd been reading the German chemists and had learned more from them than all the economists combined.

And so Levig's work was very important to this. Now, he didn't understand it all. Many of the things that we now take for granted were not yet known.

The role of cells, the role of living creatures, you know, at the cellular level, that were actually causing much of the stink, if you will, he didn't know about. And that took other scientists, Pasteur, for example. So he's one. I talk about another one.

th century or from about: 1900

He borrowed the word from someone else, but he gave it meaning.

And he was the one that basically did the studies that showed that the Earth wasn't a whole lot of little separate pieces that didn't interact, but rather was a complete system of interchanges of what he called biogeochemical cycles. And again, that's a word he invented. And he did much of the research that basically underlies modern theories of how the Earth system works.

Now, he's an interesting guy in his own right. He was active in Russian politics. He was a liberal. He was a member of the Russian Duma, the parliament.

He opposed the Russian Revolution, but also opposed the efforts of the Western countries and of the White Russians to overthrow the government. And after the Russian Civil War, Lenin specifically invited Vernadsky to return to Russia.

He'd gone into exile and set up his own research lab, which he did in St. Petersburg or Petrograd and he spent the rest of his life working in Russia. He was not himself a Marxist, but he was a Russian patriot.

And he produced an enormous amount of research, most of which didn't get known in the west because he was writing in Russia. And then of course, the Cold War was on all the prejudices there.

rediscovered really since the: 1950

in St. Louis beginning in the: 1940

s were going off in the early: 1950

And literally hundreds of thousands of people sent in the baby teeth from their kids.

And then they analyzed them and discovered how much the fallout from nuclear explosions was traveling, how it was all over the place, and it was in the kids teeth. And in particular strontium 90, which is the. One of the radioactive elements that was produced only in atomic explosions.

So I mean, he's getting at this subject of everything links together. This is not. You can't simply set off a atomic bomb in Nevada and expect that it's going to have no effect in England.

But it did because the atmosphere carries those things around. He also then went on to become a major figure in the environmental movement.

ken Circle, which came out in: 1970

And his book, which is now back in print, really deserves to be widely read. Terms we use now, he doesn't use ecology scarcely appears in his book, and Metabolic Rift doesn't appear in his book, but the ideas certainly do.

What he described is very much the kind of thing I'm talking about in my book.

Steven Grumbine: 00:24:07

I just want to bring us back to capitalism, right? And I want to make a editorial statement here. I think a lot of people debate the. Even the existence of capitalism, which I find humorous.

But in reality, the concept of capitalism is oftentimes thrown up like a talk to the hand, not to the face kind of movement, where that's the beyond. The conversation ended. You. You said capitalism, okay? Capitalism's the cause.

We understand, most of us understand that capitalism has had a horrible effect on our lives in general. It is alienated us from our work. It has created systems that predate upon people and subjugate people and really enslave people.

At some level, the idea that capitalism is this benign thing that, you know, we just need a few reforms and it'll be okay. And it feels folly. But the problem is, is that a lot of times people stop at just saying capitalism, capitalism's the problem.

Can you explain the mechanisms of capitalism that fuel this biohazard that we're living through?

Ian Angus: 00:25:19

is an article he wrote about: 1853

He says he compares it to the pagan idol that will only grant your wishes in exchange for human sacrifices. It will only drink the nectar from the skulls of the slain.

And that's an important way of thinking about capitalism because what he's saying is capitalism does good things, but the only way it does them is in destructive ways. And that's consistent in the history of capitalism. Now, the problem here is people will fake capitalism, and they.

Unless you have a fairly clear idea of what capitalism is, you know, it is not just I can set up a store if I want to. It is not just I get to own my house. In fact, neither of those things are particularly characteristic of capitalism.

They have existed in previous societies, and they'll probably exist in future ones. What we're talking about in capitalism is a system that has certain fundamental characteristics.

The first one is basically that the means of production, the means of making all of the things we need, all of the, you know, you name it, the billions of things that are made, the ways of making those are privately owned. They're in the hands of people who own them and use them for their own purposes and their own enrichment.

That's fundamental to the system is that private ownership. Second to it is the need for profit. And that's again, absolutely critical. Mark uses the formula mcm.

He says what a capitalist does, he takes m, which is money. He uses it to buy commodities, which would be the things he needs to make things.

And it means the ability to labor of the working people who work for him or who he hires. He buys those commodities and uses them and then uses what they make. To sell and get more money.

And it's constantly this money to commodities, to money.

And if the second amount of money isn't bigger than the first one, that is, if he's not actually selling the goods for more than they cost, the whole thing is pointless and nobody would do it. And as that need to constantly grow, to constantly accumulate more and more wealth is just built into the system, there really isn't a way around it.

When you have a system that's based on making profit, well, when you think about what that means for the environment, I would just think in very simple terms, very obvious terms that we all know about.

Taking oil out of the ground, petroleum out of the ground, and turning it into oil and gasoline and selling that is one of the biggest businesses there is.

Well, the process of doing that also generates a whole lot of stuff that the capitalist can't sell, that there's no money in it, and that's carbon dioxide, among many other things. So instead of preserving that, what the oil company does is simply release it into the atmosphere.

And as a result, we end up with steadily increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past half century to the point where there's now actually more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been for several million years. And that's what's causing global warming. That happens right across the board.

Isvan Musarus was a Hungarian philosopher who says the measure of capitalist growth is the measure of waste. How much waste and pollution do they create? That's how you tell how rich a country under capitalism is.

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Steven Grumbine: 00:29:28

Well said. I think one of the other.

You know, I've got a bunch of them, by the way, but one of the things that jumped out at me a lot was the idea of private ownership, which you said.

And I want to, I'm doing this as much as a document of record here to make sure we have a trail, you know, a chain of custody, from the thought to the final product here.

And what you said, what you laid clear, and I think Marxism as a whole in general lays clear, is that private owners, not democratic politics, not democratic publics, not the public sector, not the working class, makes these decisions. And so in the absence of workplace and community democracy, how does this enable metabolic rifts to grow and what are the consequences of that?

I mean, obviously we've laid out quite a few of them here. I mean, it just. The biosphere is going to continue to warm up.

Even if we stopped everything now, we've already warmed up so much to your point, centuries from now it'll still be melting ice and so forth. Help me understand what that private ownership does and the lack of democratic control over the means of production.

Ian Angus: 00:30:38

Well, I guess the simplest way to think about it is if I were the president of, I don't know, pick your company.

If I were the president of Toyota or General Motors or some oil company or other, me as a socialist might not just plunked into the, into the executive office. I'm now the CEO of a great big company. I'm still an ecosocialist. I still have the desire to produce a really nice world.

So I start issuing all kinds of instructions because I'm now the president. And I tell everybody, okay, from now on, we are not going to pump out any emissions into the atmosphere. We're going to cut those off immediately.

We're going to install what it takes to stop them. We are going to stop forcing our employees to work long hours and at low pay. We are going to pay better than living wage to everybody who works here.

We're going to do all of these things. Basically, we are going to become a company that works to save the planet, that really does everything that the scientists say is necessary.

Well, you know, the first thing that's going to happen, the profits of the company are going to plunge because we're spending enormous amounts of our income on of our money on things that don't produce revenue. So we are not reducing costs, which is what's fundamental to maintaining a profit level.

We're increasing them substantially in areas where there is no prospect of a profit. So what I'm going to tell you is that I would not last long in that CEO's job. Right on the board of directors or the big shareholders.

The banks who own very large percentages of these companies are basically going to get me kicked out. And they're going to put somebody in who's going to do it their way. And the fact is that if I want to keep my job, I would have to change my views.

And the job, in fact, tends to. There tends to be a filter in every corporation.

There is a filter in every corporation which keeps people like me out of the, out of the corporate suite.

The people that get put into that position are the people who can live with, or perhaps never Even gave any thought to the moral damage they are doing to the world.

The fact that if you are an oil company today, your current activities, the things you do every day, all the time, are dooming our children and our grandchildren to live in an absolutely devastated world. And I'm sure that many of those executives would say, if you ask them in private, oh, yeah, I want my children to live in a nice world, and so on.

But they, in order to be president, Marx refers to the capitalists. He says, in their jobs, they are the personifications of capital. They actually act as capital in human form, and capital has to grow.

We have to go back to that MCM formula where the second M always has to be bigger than the first one. The money that you take in always has to be bigger than the money you spent. And. And if it isn't, you go out of business.

Steven Grumbine: 00:33:41

You know, I want to say that for a long time we were champions of like a Green New Deal. And I got to tell you, part of what radicalized this organization was the insanely obvious lack of democracy.

And then we started putting theory to what our eyes were seeing and things like, we speak frequently about Gramsci because Gramsci's cultural hegemony really, really helped open our eyes to how the bourgeois society and the system itself kind of manufactures consent, and that the institutions tend to be direct, you know, food chain, if you will, thought chain from the oligarchy, if you are the powers that be.

And really, at the end of the day, what you just said adds to that with, it's really not whether or not they're a good person, it's the system demands it in order to.

You know, part of that cultural hegemon is, hey, you got to work hard and do great things and you can move right on up the food chain, move up the ladder, become a CEO someday, become a this, become a that. And then when you realize that part of that is that now all of a sudden you've got to become capitalism personified.

It kind of goes back to what Rosa Luxemburg said about a socialist entering into government doesn't change the government to a socialist government, but instead that socialist becomes an administrator of capital.

Ian Angus: 00:35:09

That's right.

Steven Grumbine: 00:35:10

And at the end of the day, I don't think people realize how deep that contradiction is. They think, hey, we'll just vote a few more progressives and everything's going to be okay.

in reality, Gillens and Page: 2014

And he said, you know something, I'm an anarchist, but there's precisely 0.0% way that my anarchist ideas right now would make sense.

We need a strong authority to be able to force the kind of changes that we need to make because we're no longer dealing with some far off distant disaster, we're dealing with a near and present danger.

I'm curious, when you think of democracy and you think of capitalism and the rift there and the quote that I gave you from Rosa and throwing some of the Gramsci stuff, you know, on and on, help me understand because it seems like people keep going to the well put NAI voted sticker on their forehead, hoping for the best and we get the worst. What are your thoughts on democracy and capitalism and their relationship in terms of being able to make change?

Ian Angus: 00:37:01

You can simply argue that the term capitalist democracy is a contradiction in terms. We live in a society where democracy is defined as once every four or five years, depending on which particular system you're under.

You get to put a mark on a piece of paper that decides who makes the decisions, but then they don't even make the decisions.

As you say, the studies that show that the decisions that are made in the US Congress have almost nothing to do with what the citizens of the United States actually want to do, the changes they actually want. And the range of democracy in our lives and our society is extraordinarily restricted.

Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't take advantage of all the opportunities that do exist. If there are opportunities to actually make even some short term changes, I'm certainly not going to oppose them and I would support them.

I think I live in a small town where not long ago there was a plan to put a pipeline through our town and we all organized and had big meetings and protests and we were able to stop it. Well, we didn't stop capitalism, but we did stop some damage being done that would have lasted a long time.

So I think those are important things to do. We should not say, you know, it's the revolution or nothing.

But I think we also have to recognize, I Mean, let me put it another way, a big part of winning the revolution is going to be building up to it.

As another thing I've said from time to time is if we can't stop a pipeline or win higher wages, what on earth makes us think we can take over the society and change it completely? The movement that needs to be made is going to have to be built by everyday people and we are going to have to learn how to fight.

There are historical examples in the United States, in Canada, where I live and so on, of people building such movements. So far we have not been successful.

But the other thing from Gramsci is the famous line about, you know, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. We know how hard it is and we know the chances that we will not win.

But on the other hand, if we don't fight at all, we know for sure we're going to lose.

Steven Grumbine: 00:39:10

You brought up something that I want to hit on really hard. You didn't sit there and say we stood in line at the ballot box for 12 hours to vote. You said you got together and organized.

You said that you protest. You did things that made it uncomfortable for them not to pay attention to you. I want to be clear that what you did and didn't say there.

Can you elaborate on that? Because I don't think people realize that to claim any form of democracy is.

It's not a spectator sport, but it's also not just an act of hitting the I voted sticker. There's a whole chasm of things. There's a difference, right? I mean, there's so much more to that conversation.

Ian Angus: 00:39:49

Yes, well, you're right, of course. Again, back to my previous comment. If democracy is something you do once every four or five years, then it's not democracy at all.

Our day to day existence is dominated by forces that we typically have no control over. You have zero control over most of the things that affect you. We tend to simply accept those.

But the way we are going to change this world is I say by organizing and going back to what I was talking about with the pipeline in my town, the town I'm living in, is very conservative. I don't think it's even ever voted liberal.

But the fact is that when people realized what was happening to their environment, we started getting meetings of 3 and 4 and 500 people and petitions and so on that ultimately won. And maintaining that kind of organization is a big part of our fight for a better world is building movements. They will rise and fall.

But if we don't spend our time building people, giving people the confidence and the ability to fight, because we're basically told there's nothing you can do. You know, there is no alternative. It's the expression.

It's easier to think of the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism for many people because we are completely dominated by this system. And the way we get around that is by changing people's actions, allowing people and engaging people in the actual fight for a better world.

Steven Grumbine: 00:41:15

You know, one of the things that I want to bring up here, because I think this is key, right?

We live in a society and we just covered this recently with some Project Censored friends that is heavily influenced by the tiniest of all tiny groups of people, the owners of media. The media voices are controlled. They have an agenda. And when you look at reality and you map it against what they say, it typically doesn't add up.

And so the art of educating a public that has a vested interest, a personal vested interest in maintaining their own stability, their own personal, you know, the synapses that fire in their own brain and their ability to be okay in society is dramatically impacted by the way people view the world and the way they view themselves within that world. And when you alter the connecting points in that, it fundamentally destabilizes a person.

And I think there's a tendency to fall backwards and to go into that. Either there is nothing we can do, or I'm just going to vote and go about my business because there's nothing I can do.

Like it ends up being a form of nihilism. And I consider the acts between voting. I'm not a huge electoral guy.

In fact, I don't believe that this system will allow us to make the kind of change that we need to do. But that said, I do believe in educating. I do believe in motivating and mobilizing and organizing.

But I think that there becomes a question of am I organizing to do this thing and then I'm done, Or am I organizing for socialism? Do I want socialism? Am I going to bring about socialism?

And some of the questions that you bring up in this, in the facts that you paint for us, the two are incompatible. Capitalism and a survivable planet are at odds with one another. So how do you do that within?

You know, I'm a project manager by trade, so let me just throw that out there. So I live in timeline land. And so when I think about crashes on my schedule, I think about deadlines and stuff like that. I'm managing risk.

I'm looking at what has to happen to make this thing happen within the timeframe we need it to happen in. And we're living with a ticking time bomb. So how do we balance that? I mean, the education, obviously organizing.

You know, I'm a little bit of a vanguardist. I'm not gonna lie. I definitely find myself a Lenin supporter. How would you tell people?

Because what I'm watching from, quote unquote, the official acceptable political parties is a bunch of hogwash. There's nothing about what we're talking about, not, not one bit of it is coming out through those official channels. So how do we educate?

And obviously I'm not asking you to solve world hunger here, but I am asking you to make the case that, you know, people don't know they've been lied to, they've been propagandized, they've been, oh, it's just a scam. This greening thing is just another scam. Blah, blah, blah.

How do we educate people and at the same time deal with the ticking time bomb that doesn't matter whether we agree with the facts or not, it's going to happen.

Ian Angus: 00:44:42

Well, you know, I've been involved in socialist and activist politics for my entire life, you know, say 50, 60 years of this kind of thing. And if I had a magic answer for how we could break through, I would have dealt with it already. You know, I don't think anybody has a magic answer.

The thing we have most going for us, and this will seem odd, but the thing that is mostly on our side ultimately is capitalism.

The fact that the system that we are in is crisis prone, constantly recreates catastrophe, constantly generates opposition of all different kinds, again and again causes people to fight back, whether it's at a local level or national level.

I mean, I'm currently watching in Bolivia where people are now basically blocking the streets, on strike en masse right now, fighting against the government. Those things do recur and the opportunities recur.

And it's those kinds of things that I think will ultimately bring the system down, that the system itself will become unbearable. Now, within that context, however, it isn't just going to happen automatically.

You know, the system gets awful and everybody rises up and says, yep, it's gone, or everybody votes for it or something like that.

Within that context, as people become aware of how bad it is and you know, it's not surprising that most people don't right away and don't over time because people have to live their lives, people have to work, people have to raise their children, people have to eat. They have all those things, all those responsibilities, all those things you have to live with. And it is hard to be an active opponent of the system.

It's hard work. So you don't tend to get large numbers in the short term.

What we are doing, I think in this phase of the development of movements is basically bit by bit acquiring people like me, like you, like others who are starting to see what's going on and start organizing, start, first of all, trying to understand what's going on, sort of figuring out which subject, which particular struggles are right now going to lead us in positive directions and help people to understand what's going on, which struggles we can actually win right now, in which people will gain confidence that they don't have to accept the way things are. All of those things are part of it. But how it's going to ultimately lead to the complete transformation.

I think all we can do is prepare to be ready for when the crisis occurs. Because the crises do occur, we know they occur again and again and again, and the power of capitalism makes it hard to fight, but it is defeatable.

Steven Grumbine: 00:47:29

You know, it's funny you say that, I agree with you, by the way, but it's funny you say that because I oftentimes will say to people, we've got to do something other than what you think you're doing. If it's the acceptable pathway, if the capitalists have given you a microphone to scream in, you better check to see if it's plugged in.

Really, at the end of the day, if you're going through the system that they've given you, the customer service line, so to speak, you're going to be waiting on hold for an awful long time. Okay? And what I think is important is that I don't need to have the answer necessarily to how we do everything.

What I need to do is demonstrate to you this problem.

We need to center and situate the problem so that people can really see it for what it is and understand the inputs, outputs, tools and techniques that are tied directly to the system so that they can begin to understand. Because right now you're right, you know, the end of history, right? Capitalism, this is what folks have come to believe in.

You know, they've been brainwashed with a million forms of self hate, you know, for why they haven't succeeded, why they aren't the boss of all, why they haven't risen up and owned the mansion, all the other lies that capitalism has to feed us to keep us behaving like temporarily embarrassed millionaires right?

Like this whole idea that we are going to suddenly become the Ayn Rand maker as opposed to the taker or whatever nonsense fills up what we call common sense. I think it's really important to understand that we have to wake these folks up. I mean, it is a part of a process that we have to do.

It's not necessarily that we have all the answers, really. It pains me. Well, what's your solution, Steve? You know, what's your solution? And it's like, I get it, you think you got me there, right?

It's like an alcoholic can't get sober until they agree that they have a problem and then they can work on a program of recovery. But you got to at least admit you got a problem. If you're not going to admit you got a problem, you're not going to solve the problem.

You're not even going to try. And I guess this brings me to the end of your book. And I want to, you know, put a little bit of a positive framing on this.

Even though I feel like we're in a really big doom spiral, given that I don't feel like we have the democratic controls that would allow us to do what we want short of revolution. I'm all about exercising muscles because we've lost them, we don't have them.

And so we need to develop some muscles somewhere so that we get the strength to fight back. But you talk about what an eco socialist society would kind of look at and you know, I'm interested.

I've always wondered this, because what I don't want to do is be the good liberal where I, like, take my recycling down the end of the street and feel like I've done a great thing or what. I don't want it to end there, you know, I mean, I don't. Well, I'm not shopping at Amazon, so I'm doing good things for the environment.

I think that it's much deeper than that. Can you sketch out what democratic metabolism restoration would look like?

It really kind of, you know, I am a central planning kind of guy for so many reasons, but I'm here to learn, so I'm not here to dictate. But I am curious, how do you make that happen? How do you create the decision making process?

And what does that system look like in your democratic eco socialist society?

Ian Angus: 00:50:50

Well, again, you know, Marx once said that he didn't want to write cookbooks for the chefs of the future.

And one of the problems, of course, is of discussing this at all, is that we don't know what the conditions are going to be like, at the point of which we are in a position to do anything about it, to make the radical changes that need to be made. How much worse will global warming be before capitalism finally bites the bullet? How much will the oceans have risen?

How badly polluted will the air be? How much of our resources and time is going to have to be devoted to.

To restoring humane conditions or to curing diseases, or all of the dealing with all of the things that this system has left us. In the last chapter of my book, I talk about some of the measures that I think need to be taken by such a government.

ce had occurred in, you know,: 1776

We are going to be governing ourselves. And the book has a number of lists of possibilities that would be in there.

I would think, for example, one of the very first things would be to decommodify the essentials of life.

That is simply to establish as quickly as we can and that there will be issues around this, that things like food, clean water, sanitation, health care, housing, education, and so on are every human being by right. Those are not things that depend on your income. Those are not things that depend on your ability to pay for them.

This society should simply provide those routinely that workplaces, our factories, our offices, wherever else should be controlled by the people who work in them. That people should be able to make decisions about how their lives are organized.

For most of us, the time we spend in the factory or in the office is the biggest single part of our lives.

But it's the time when in the current system, we are totally subject to a dictatorship in which we have absolutely zero input into what we do, how we do it, how we relate to the other workers and the other activities that are going on in the organization, the democratizing that structure is going to be utterly critical.

Changing agriculture so that it focuses more on maintaining the soil, or we stop spending so much time in our farming systems producing things that aren't even human food. The single largest crop in the United States is corn, almost all of which goes either to feed livestock or to make ethanol.

Very little of it ends up on human tables as food. Changing the structure of the food system is going to be a very big part of it.

But all of those things are going to require taking profit out of the picture, establishing that the goal of the economy should be to meet human needs, not to maximize profit. In fact, profit should not be a significant factor at all.

Obviously, we have to have control, but we can't simply leave it to the wishes of the people who make income from it.

Steven Grumbine: 00:54:05

I want to take a moment to plug the kind of stuff that we talk about here as well.

One of the things that stressed me out when I began my journey in Marx was that I come from a modern monetary theory background and understanding that the state is the creature that creates the currency.

And being able to do these things, I started off very naively going, well, you know, we'll just vote for a few more progress and we'll have a Green New Deal. It'd be great, everything be kosher. But the fact is that the state itself can decommodify our existence. It can provide universal basic services.

It can provide a job guarantee for everyone, and it can provide a job that is directly in service of the environment in terms of the community. It can provide jobs that people themselves create, that serve needs that are not considered profitable.

Like what you were saying, hey, I'd be a terrible CEO because, you know, I'd want to do these great things. Well, you can do that with a job guarantee. So these were things that I really.

That we positioned, we cared about, we put forward, and they're all still valuable. I still believe that you could provide universal basic services.

You just can't get there because it flies in the face of what capitalism is and the system itself. And all you have to do is look at the revolving door, the enclosure, the capture that the capitalists have done to whatever government.

And I don't believe it's something that just happened.

I believe this is something that was baked in from the start that we're just maybe getting hip to, or maybe we had forgotten and now it's coming back in vogue.

But the reality is, is that our government right now, today could, if it was not a capitalist government running capitalist affairs, could in fact make the decision to provide all those things to us as a public commons, as a good, as a right, as you called it. And I think for me, the real thing that radicalized me was realizing that it could do that, but it won't do that, and it isn't doing that.

And people are afraid to ask for better because there's no pathway to getting what we ask for, to get into legislative reality through the systems that the capitalists have kind of paved out for us. I mean, I think it was Elizabeth Warren that came out and said I'm a capitalist to my bones.

And of course we have Nancy Pelosi, the billionaire who sits there and, you know, trades and so forth. We are not represented in any way, shape or form by people that look for what the working class wants.

They serve bourgeois society, they serve capital. And every single decision made, if there's any kind of crumbs that they throw our way, we celebrate like we won the Super Bowl.

And the reality is, is that it's all within their power. He literally choose not to do it.

And the worst part, and I think this is the part that really radicalized me the most, was I had always believed it was my quote unquote, hard earned tax dollars that were doing this stuff. When in reality they spend money into existence.

So they not only give us the double whammy of making us feel guilty that we didn't vote hard enough, we didn't do whatever hard enough, we didn't phone bank hard enough, we didn't whatever, but then they turn around and they fund wars directly, not with our tax. They never, they don't even increase tax. They don't even pretend anymore we got to raise a war tax to pay for this war. No, they just do it.

But then the minute you say, hey, what about Medicare for or what about, you know, a universal health care? What about, you know, child this or that, they're like, oh, we just, we don't have the money, we're broke.

Where are we going to find the money for that? How are you going to pay for that, Steve?

So this kind of dance that we do, this fake dance where we pretend like the nation's drowning in debt, right? I mean, it's like it's a ruse. That part of the hegemonic nature, the austerity narrative folks like Clara Matei talk to very eloquently.

I think it's really important to understand that it is possible, but it's not in their class interest to do this. Your final thoughts take us out.

Ian Angus: 00:58:17

Right. Well, back on your discussion.

When you say our government could do things, I think the problem is that it's not our government, it's their government. And that's an utterly critical part of this. It is not us that decides to have a war budget of a trillion dollars a year.

I mean an insane amount that it's spent on bombing people on the other side of the world into the stone age. The wealth of this society is extraordinarily large and we certainly could restore the earth.

says he wrote this back about: 1900

He said, some men faint hearted ever seek, are programmed to retouch and will insist whenever they speak that we demand too much. Tis passing strange, yet I declare such statements give me mirth for our demands most moderate are we only want the earth. And that is what we want.

Steven Grumbine: 00:59:28

Wow, that is powerful, man. I really appreciate that. Hey, Ian, I want to thank you so much for. For joining me today. This was a pleasure.

I mean, it was kind of a random selection out there on Substack. I want to be honest.

I mean, I feel bad that I had not heard of you, but I'm glad that I have heard of you and I'm glad I reached out and I'm glad you said yes and I'm glad I got your book. It's really good. It's powerful. It fits into the work that we're trying to do here. Where can we find more of your work?

Obviously on Substack, but where else?

Ian Angus: 01:00:00

Well, I maintain the Climate and Capitalism, which is climate and capitalism.com just the words. I have been writing there and publishing other people's material there for 20 years. So I would you certainly refer you to that.

I've also written about half a dozen books on subjects related to this. My latest one, as you've said, is called Metabolic Rifts.

I had one come out two years ago called the War against the Commons, which is about capitalism's taking away of land from the people who produce. And possibly the book that has had the most circulation is my book Facing the Anthropocene and that you talked at the beginning.

So certainly if people want to find what my views on things, those books are readily available from any.

Any bookstore can order them for you if they don't have them in stock and they're available from most of the online bookstores or you can go directly to my publisher, Monthly Review Press, their website, that you can buy the books there. But I would say my substack, certainly. But I would say climateandcapitalism.com is the main place that people can learn about.

Steven Grumbine: 01:01:03

What I have to think that's fantastic. And I just want to say you are very accessible, you are very flexible and I appreciate you just doing this.

So with that, I hope we can have you back again sometime soon.

Just so you know, every Tuesday night We do a webinar for that week's podcast and we sit down, we break it down into 15 minute increments and we have a little mini video that shows the words that go across and they've got caricatures of myself and the speaker and we put some funny little emojis and things in there, GIFs and things to help keep people's interest alive. But we break it down to 15 minute increments and we talk about it, we discuss it. And when this comes out, it would be an honor to have you.

If your schedule allows you to join us, it's 8pm Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday nights. And again, this will probably come out in a couple weeks, so I can let you know offline when it occasionally is if you're available.

Ian Angus: 01:01:59

Thanks very much. I will do my best.

Steven Grumbine: 01:02:01

Absolutely. All right, well, I'm going to go ahead and take us out.

First of all, let me thank my guest, Ian Angus, who we've just been talking about his book which is called Metabolic Capitalism's Assault on the Earth System. And you know, folks, this is Real Progressives. This is podcast Macro and Cheese is a part of Real progressives, which is a 501C3.

We live and die on your contributions. There is absolutely no billionaire sitting there throwing money at us. We are scratching and clawing.

So if you consider what we're doing worthwhile, please consider becoming a monthly donor. You can go to patreon.com RealProgressives Become a monthly donor there. You can go to our substack Real Progressives and become a monthly donor.

Or you can go to our website realprogressives.org and become a monthly donor or a one time donor there.

All donations are helpful and if you have the bug, we are also a volunteer driven organization so we could always use help with producing the work that we do here. And so with that, on behalf of my guests, Ian Angus, myself, Steve Grumbine for the podcast Macro and Cheese, we are outta here.

End Credits: 01:03:24

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