Social planning needs to reflect the labour required to restore, protect, and maintain a certain equilibrium, a certain “quality” of non-human nature. Agriculture, food-getting, and land management cluster into a bundle of related although distinct tasks. Pastoralism, agroecology, agroforestry, and terracing all contribute to biodiversity and food production, sequester carbon in soil and herbaceous matter, and produce crops. While sectors of biomes will need special care, this ought not to be based on the apartheid concept of the steel separation of the species from one another, and in particular a separation of humans from nature, but decentralized ecological planning. This ought to be nested within a system of protection of land rights and political sovereignty at local, regional, and national scales, ensuring that gender marginalization is not reproduced, and in so doing attending to historical inequalities in power within post-colonial states, identified by markers, such as caste, race, and ethnicity.
Max Ajl, Peripheral Labour and Accumulation on a World Scale in the Green Transitions
In the Global South, state structures, particularly those tied to militarization and sovereignty, are vital to social reproduction, national
by Max Ajl, 2 Jul 2025
"The US-Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran marked the latest phase of Washington’s war on the region, and on Iran specifically. A war sometimes white-hot, waged with missiles and quadcopters, and at others quiet and cold, waged through the violence of sanctions, impoverishment, and siege.
These wars seek to accelerate de-development and state collapse. They work to destroy sovereign states that lie outside the US security umbrella. States that can incarnate a desire for dignity, serve as vehicles and protective shields for liberation movements, and extend solidarity through arms, technology, vetoes, or peaceful trade routes to circumvent asphyxiating embargoes.
And so, as the US-Israeli attack against the Islamic Republic proceeded with overt US involvement, those opposing this aggression were divided into two camps.
One camp argued in defense of Iran’s right to self-determination and self-defense against imperial powers. It insists on the Iranian people’s right to choose their government as they see fit, resist predatory aggression, and calls for the US and Israel to immediately cease all military operations. Some within this camp went further, recognizing that Iran’s material support for regional resistances forces and technological, logistical, and military support for the regional asymmetric militia, sovereign states, and popular movements is liberatory and just.
Meanwhile, another camp – the military term is the correct one – argued for solidarity with an abstract, seldom-defined people. But never with the regime, never with the state, never with the Islamic Republic. They took a radical distance from the IRI military, the apparatus of governance, and any other polluted residue or container for Iranian-style practices: repression, authoritarianism, Islamic governance, sub-imperialism.
This stance was misleading and even malicious. History has burdened us with social scientific-historical examples of the uses and mis-uses of selective solidarity that fetishizes beatific “people,” often poorly represented or punishingly oppressed by one regime or another (Libya, Syria, Hamas in Gaza), and who need “saving” by Apaches, B-52s, and death squads masquerading as “revolutionaries.” [...]
Who could forget Western human rights organizations and academics obediently echoing the false claim that Hamas rockets struck al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, laying the ideological groundwork for Israel’s ongoing demolition of Gaza’s hospitals, routinely rebranded as Hamas command centers.
In the case of Iran, many are willing to condemn Israeli mayhem on civilian institutions, but not on the Iranian military. There is also a considerable reluctance to defend the Iranian right to self-defense through its military.
This brings us to a fundamental question: what is a military, and what is a state? The illusion that the state is nothing but an engine of domestic repression; a carnival of hopeless evil inspired by fashionable US core abolitionism, has no relationship to reality. [...] Somehow, for many, the concept of the state – social security, higher education, public hospitals – is permitted in Northern discourse and for Northern peoples. [...] In Iran, those rallying behind the military and its defense, perceive the idea of the state as a banner, a means to defend all those things the state provides. In this sense, patriotism in the South, particularly in Iran, is not reactionary; it is a working-class ideology.
A more charitable narrative allows for the state’s civilian functions, in the Global South and certainly in Iran. Attacks on hospitals, schools, power plants, and above all, “women and children,” are condemned – as though women do not have husbands, and children do not have fathers. But the practical mechanisms that would protect hospitals, schools, power plants, cannot be mentioned. Attacks are condemned, but self-defense is never defended. [...]
In the context of Iranian militarization, the state has been crucial to developing sovereign industrial capacity, increasingly tied to China and Russia, recognizing that producing more and more of its needs domestically was the sole guarantor of its position as the regional force for political sovereignty. Iranian self-defense is not just local; it is regional.
The IRI provides the possibility of weapons to the poor and besieged, shares blueprints, and gifts arms to regional anti-symmetric militias or state forces like Ansar Allah. In this context, the role of the state is unavoidable, and the idea of the state is what allows people to assume their roles.
By separating “the regime” from “the people,” the US-Israeli propaganda justifies state collapse in the name of the people. You cannot defend a people by adopting the rhetoric used to justify their destruction."
When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and
We cannot understand industrialization outside the history of colonialism, and its relationship to a system of accumulation of surplus value – capitalism. Following the insights of Samir Amin, Celso Furtado, Raul Prebisch, Eric Williams, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, and Walter Rodney, amongst others, this perspective characterizes the seemingly apolitical process of industrialization as linked the violence of primitive accumulation, commodification, exchange, and war. That is, the slave trade, the colonization of the United States, the erection of colonial plantations in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America, all contributing the raw materials, food items, and export markets which subtended the low-waged process of European and eventually US industrialization. These processes, whose echoes are still reverberating, produced a massive amount of CO2 emissions. Furthermore, contemporary patterns of exchange, although not occurring under direct colonial patterns of control, are still unequal on South-North lines. That is, trade between formally independent states, based on the seemingly efficient price system, hides a new mode of control. An hour of labor in the North continues to receive a far higher reward than an hour of labor in the South, even when using similar or identical technologies, and northern products exchange for ever-increasing amounts of southern resources over time. As a result, wealth concentrates in the North, in part because wages and profit concentrate there, and produce and reproduce social-economic polarization within the world system.
In the US, around 6,000 calories of food are produced per person per day; 30–40 percent of it is lost, including in the many stages of capitalist production and transport, and around 10 percent goes to animal feed. This leaves around 3,700 calories per person. Humans need far less than that, although perhaps a more active and nature-engaged population would be a hungrier one, too. On a global basis, total calories available per person are closer to 3,100, with less food waste, especially in the Third World, including China and Greece. Food waste is intimately related to the syndrome of production that links industrial monocrops to urban and slum consumers. Elongated production chains are blighted with weak links and rust. They only make sense from the perspective of the monopolies that forge them and use them to strangle the planet and its poor. In rural areas, food waste is far lower.
Before the colonial conquest, much of the US was a managed forest-garden. Through controlled burns, bison runs, terracing, earth works, and farming, the entire continent ranged in between what used to be understood as hunter-gathering and settled agriculture. It was not a pristine “first nature,” wilderness, or unsettled. People lived in and remade nature.
For some sense of those killed or made homeless by climate-related disasters, note that from 1980 to 2002, the total was 300,964 killed in Ethiopia, 168,584 in Bangladesh, 150,362 in Sudan, and 101,473 in Mozambique. During that period, 62,553,000 were made homeless in Bangladesh, as were 8,679,282 in Pakistan and 7,823,102 in the Philippines. As Oxfam reports, on average, over 20 million people a year were internally displaced by extreme weather disasters over the last ten years. Small island nations like Cuba, Dominica, and Tuvalu, archipelagos like the Philippines, and immiserated states like Somalia are amongst the ten countries where people are likeliest to be afflicted by climate-caused disasters like cyclones and floods. Not one of them is in the top 95 emitters in the world.
Too often forgotten is the huge amount of waste that is built into capitalism and the private property regime. Consumer goods, for example, are not produced for people, but for profit: planned obsolescence leads to greater profit rather than planning the production of products for permanence. Remember here that hierarchical social life based on greed and accumulation prevent the human level of society from rising, and prevent humankind from using the existing technological inheritance, including the collective shared and keystone commonwealth of humanity, knowledge, for the collective and egalitarian betterment of society and its poor.
Cuba uses a lot of diesel because even though the island is doused in sunshine, it cannot generate enough solar energy to power countryside mass transit, in part because of the vicious economic embargo. Cuba, alone, has an HDI on the threshold of “high” (0.778) with per capita kilowatt usage far below the world average and even estimates of a “vital minimum” of 2,000 kilowatt hours. Some may say people are still poor in Cuba, and that’s true: HDI doesn’t tell us everything. But Cuba is also blockaded, and shows the possibility of high human development with incredibly low environmental impact.
